


While Time Serves

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Betty breaks up with a boyfriend at the start, Cumbria, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Mention of canon self harm, OC death- because otherwise they'd be almost 200 years old, Period Typical Attitudes, Smut, Supernatural Elements, Time slip, tags make it sound like a downer but it isn't, tuberculosis, vague mention of minor OC suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-16 11:35:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29824338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Betty and Jughead are old friends but Betty wonders if they could be more.  While she's on a research trip to England to learn about a literary ancestor she discovers that it really is never too late to take a risk on love.  It's a time-slip homage to great Victorian novels and to the creative struggle which women in the past had to engage in to make lives that they could tolerate.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 147
Kudos: 45





	1. Let Me Never Love You Less

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cattycooper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cattycooper/gifts).



> This story is a gift for cattycooper. Thank you for all you do in the fandom and thank you for making the gifset of my dreams.
> 
> Full disclosure. I am a book nerd. I am especially nerdy about nineteenth century novels. A whole lot of them found their way into this story. If you’re a book nerd too it might be fun to spot them. Why is Eliza’s last name Furnivall?  
> The title is from Robert Herrick's poem Corrinna's Going A-Maying. Here is the final stanza.  
> Come, let us go while we are in our prime ;  
> And take the harmless folly of the time.  
>  We shall grow old apace, and die  
>  Before we know our liberty.  
>  Our life is short, and our days run  
>  As fast away as does the sun ;  
> And, as a vapour or a drop of rain  
> Once lost, can ne'er be found again,  
>  So when or you or I are made  
>  A fable, song, or fleeting shade,  
>  All love, all liking, all delight  
>  Lies drowned with us in endless night.  
> Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,  
> Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter headings in this story are from [this song](https://youtu.be/gSSah_EKwhQ) by the best band in the world, The Mountain Goats. The song is called Isaiah 45:23

# Prologue 

Betty opened the journal, took a deep breath and began to read the last words her five times great aunt had ever written.

> _Fortunate indeed are those who are free to set their own course in life. It is the more common lot to be bound in by our duty, our responsibilities, the ropes of affection and love that trim our sails and steer our ship. Had the world been other than it is, had my charts been different, my course would have been other. Nevertheless I am proud of the life I made. I have done my duty. I hope that I leave my small corner of the world better than I found it. I have loved a man with every part of my heart and soul and it is my fondest hope that my love enriched his life, perhaps saved it, even though I was not able to speak it as I would have wished. It is my opinion that it is a very great thing to be loved as I have loved him and I refuse to believe that my death negates it. This love, that survived all obstacles and separations, will survive even this most decisive parting. In February the hawthorn appears quite dead, its dry branches contorted against leaden skies, grey thorns twisted by the wind that shrieks from the fells, yet Spring comes as she must and the young people gather knots of the blossom to crown the King and Queen of the May. In winter the tree is hawthorn, a crown of thorns to mark a sacrifice and a death, but in Spring it is the may, heady sweet blossoms for a wedding posy and the promise of new life and plenty. This is merely our winter. Spring will follow._

As Betty read Eliza’s final words the tears streamed over her cheeks. She dashed them away to keep the moisture from the fragile paper. She reached for her phone. How dare she mock Eliza’s loss by refusing to seize her own may blossom summer?

# Chapter One : Let Me Never Love You Less

> _Love is like the wild rose-briar,_  
>  _Friendship like the holly-tree—_  
>  _The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms_  
>  _But which will bloom most constantly?_
> 
> From _Love and Friendship_ by Emily Brontë

Two months earlier.

Betty was shivering, her teeth chattering. She was used to cold but this wasn’t the dry, powdery, snow-angel weather of her childhood, this cold was wet and penetrating. It seeped into the marrow of her bones and chilled her from within. And the heating systems, such as they were in England, seemed more intent on building character and engineering skill than dispelling the gnawing wintriness. In an effort to understand Eliza, to walk a mile in her shoes, she had decided to hike up High Pike, a walk that, according to the essays, had been a favourite of her ancestor. Eliza had made it sound like a pleasant jaunt but Betty had been sensible enough to wrap up in a down stuffed parka and pull on the pale blue knitted hat that had been a going away gift from her dearest beanie wearing pal. She had pulled on hiking boots even though she thought as she did so that she was probably overdoing it and her sneakers would be fine. They definitely would not have been fine. The walk was six miles but it had felt like twelve. The paths were steep and rocky. The stones seemed placed deliberately to jut into the soles of her boots making her calves ache as she struggled not to turn an ankle. There were places where she had no alternative but to walk through mossy bogs, the freezing water in those brackish pools over topping her boots. She needed the waterproof leg-warmer items that she saw other hikers wearing around their ankles but she had no idea what they were called so if she tried to buy them she’d look like even more of a dumbass.

She had ascended eventually to a bleak hilltop, girdled by fog, with only a strange squat concrete monolith to morosely acknowledge her effort. It was damp, boring and uncomfortable not exhilarating or sublime, whatever had been promised by Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. It had been an arduous, depressing slog and she was only at the halfway mark of the day’s walk. Since there was no view to be had from the summit she immediately turned around and trudged back on increasingly numb feet. 

The walk gave her too much time to think, the mist and low cloud obscuring any interest that might have been in the landscape. Impressions presented themselves to her mind like a tarot deck of memories. Jug’s long, knotty fingers passing a soft package wrapped in a page from a literary supplement across a sticky bar table. Her own unmanicured fingers unwrapping the hat. The pressure at the top of her nose as she tried not to cry. A different image. Simon’s face pale, his mouth tight and angry, his eyes cold. Another. Veronica, holding her tight against her silk robe, Betty’s cheek against her breast as she cried, soft and perfumed, what a woman ought to be instead of snotty and homeless, hauling a suitcase of unflattering clothes from one disaster to the next. She wondered when her self sabotage had begun. Had it been the night of the freight train as she had imagined or had she really been destroying her own happiness for much, much longer? Another image. Eliza, dragging her long skirts through this black mud, after a long day in the schoolroom, grey woollen gloves, a quilted bonnet tied under her chin. Had she ever felt this kind of despair about her life?

Finally she was back in the cottage, chilled, chastened and mud-splattered. It was almost as cold inside as it had been out on the darkening fell and the only remedy for that depended upon her ability to light the bewildering cast iron range with its doors and valves and dampers. What would Eliza have made of her five times great niece that she could give a lecture on the differences between a Shakespearean and a Petrarchan sonnet but was completely unequal to the task of keeping herself from freezing? Betty wondered if her generation was the first to lack the fundamental skills upon which the species had depended since the dawn of time. She couldn’t make fire, she had no idea how to darn a sock or put up preserves, she evidently couldn’t hold onto a man. She remembered these hateful feelings from her teenage years, anxiety, self loathing, a desire to manifest her inner turmoil with an outwardly visible wound, blood dripping from her fingertips when she released her cliched fists. Jug’s hands again, reaching out for hers and uncurling her fingers when he saw what she had been doing. She couldn’t recall when she had stopped hurting herself but picturing his hands on hers reminded her how she had stopped. She shook her head and told herself, as he had, quietly and calmly, that there were plenty of things she could do. She could fix a carburettor and fill in a grant application form, she could express an amusing thought in fewer than 280 characters... and she could isolate herself in a draughty cottage three and a half thousand miles away from the people she loved and depended upon. Unfortunately there was no way to tweet herself cosy. At the expense of almost an entire box of matches she eventually kindled a thin apricot twist of flame which itself seemed to be shivering. Then she wept a little as put the kettle on top of the stove so that she could make a cup of tea. It seemed the most appropriately English response to misery. The meagreness of the flame suggested that she would have a long wait so she went into the living room and tried to pull her toes up inside her seater as she sat shivering on the couch. Within just a few minutes she heard the kettle whistle and when she went back to the kitchen the stove was radiating shimmering heat and the fire was roaring. She was amazed that her poor effort could have turned out so well. Perhaps she had another skill to add to the list.

Despite the cheery warmth from the stove she still felt lonely. She missed Jughead and Toffee, Veronica and Archie. She missed her comfortable apartment. She still sort of missed Simon although surely not as much as she should after being with him for almost four years. She was even low enough at this point to miss her mother. She wondered if she was being stubborn or if her determination to embark on this harebrained scheme was pure hubris. Now, in this empty cottage, alone and filled with self doubt, it seemed like it had been another act of self harm. If she had maintained the status quo Simon would have used his tenure to get her some teaching hours at Syracuse this semester, there would have been good dinners at fancy restaurants and she could have written her thesis on some well known American poet in a warm and well appointed university library instead of researching her, very possibly deservedly, disregarded ancestor in this sad and dilapidated cottage. 

She had been warned. Her mother said she was crazy to go schlepping halfway round the world when she could have stayed home, married Simon and not bothered about the PhD. After all, Alice said, she was already well qualified enough to read to the beautiful babies that Simon would have given her and “Dr” was so ageing on a woman. Veronica had said that the only part of England that was tolerable was Wimbledon for a fortnight of strawberries and Pimms. The North was simply inconceivable. Simon had been hurt and confused when she told him her plan. There had been a scene even though he absolutely hated a scene. “Look Libby since you’re so desperate to get away from me that you’ll move to the wilds of fucking Yorkshire or wherever the hell it is, maybe we should just call it a day. Then you could turn to your pal with the hat for consolation, like everyone thinks you will eventually.” Betty had stared at him in stunned silence. It was so ridiculous for him to be jealous of her friendship with Jughead that she almost laughed. She stopped herself because he looked so angry and upset. 

“Simon, you’re being crazy. You know it isn’t like that between us. He’s like my brother. We were in kindergarten together. It’s a friendship, just like I have with Veronica. You aren’t jealous of her too are you?” She had never mentioned to Simon that she and Jug had dated for a hot minute in high school. There had been a time when her tender teenaged heart imagined they were in love, doodling “Betty Jones, Betty Cooper-Jones, Elizabeth Jones-Cooper” in her journal with a pineapple scented pen, but somehow it had never felt right. It had seemed like they were downgrading their friendship by being “just” boyfriend and girlfriend, going to the movies together instead of sitting all night in Archie’s treehouse and talking about everything, nothing off limits. He’d told her when his mom wouldn’t talk to him on the phone, she’d asked him if it was normal for a girl to think about sex and even touch herself. You could do that with a dear friend but it would be scandalous to stay out all night with a boyfriend even if it was only to talk. With a boyfriend she would have to make sure her mascara wasn’t smudged, that her hair was clean and shiny. When they were dating she missed having one person with whom there had never been any pretence to perfection, a person with whom she could let down her guard. When he was her boyfriend she felt obliged to bring that defence back up, to be the perfect girlfriend. Their intimacy seemed to demand a physical connection that scared them both, too much, too fast. Where was there to go from where they were except to crash and burn? So they had agreed to step back. Now she barely ever thought about how it had been to have permission to simply reach out for him, to kiss his mouth, to place her hand on his belly under his shirt and see him suck in his breath between his teeth, a reaction partly to the chill of her fingers, partly something else. It was long over, prehistory, and now he was her pal and it would have only confused Simon to have mentioned it.

“Girlfriends are different,” Simon had grumbled and she assured him that it really wasn’t the case. It would have been a bad moment to mention that she and V hadn’t always been completely platonic. That would have only confused him more. She’d let Simon take her to bed and she’d tried to show him that they’d be fine, that her research trip to Cumbria wasn’t about escaping from him, that everything could stay as it was. Now, as she looked back on it she realised she should have packed a bag and left that night but she’d invested years in the relationship and it was hard to let it go. As Simon grunted and laboured, trying his best to make her happy she’d recalled what he’d said, that her friendship with Jughead was different. She remembered her breezy denial and wondered if she’d been lying to herself just as much as him. She thought about her friend, that swoop of soft dark hair, his blue eyes crinkling as he smiled at her over the book when he read to her, his long, knotty fingers wrapping around her ponytail and tugging as he’d done, teasingly, since they were five years old. The orgasm took her by surprise, approaching like a freight train, nothing she could do to halt it and then rattling and roaring through her like when she and Jug had taken their slushies out behind Pop’s and watched by the railroad tracks, screaming in wild elation as the trains passed.

Simon groaned, finished and collapsed onto her and she wanted nothing more than to push him onto the floor, anywhere away from her and scream out her revulsion. She managed to calm herself enough to slide out of bed as he reached for her. “I have to pee. Good UT health disciplines,” she said lightly, suppressing the horror and guilt and disgust that it would have been cruel to let him see. In the bathroom, she turned on the shower and scrubbed herself until her skin tingled. She didn’t know what was disgusting her, Simon’s sex face, her emotional betrayal, the thought of what Jug would do if he knew she was thinking of him while having sex with her boyfriend? All of it probably.

She’d got through the next week by avoiding Simon’s touches and pretending to be asleep when he reached for her at night but it was obvious to her that it was over. She made him his favourite meal, poured him a glass of Malbec and told him she was leaving him as clearly and directly as she would have wanted to hear it if the roles had been reversed. “I’m sorry Simon. I’m moving in with Veronica and Archie until I go to England. You haven’t done anything wrong and there’s no-one else but I don’t feel the way I should if this was going to work. I want you to be free to meet other people.” He was angry, there was a smashed wine glass and his mouth was a tight, angry line but she was determined. She went to the bedroom where she had already packed a bag, picked up Toffee in her carrier and headed for the door.

“You can’t take the cat,” he said flatly as she put her hand on the door. She looked around, confused, to see him standing by the dining table. “I bought it. It’s my cat. It stays here.”

“You gave her to me. She’s mine. You don’t even like her. You say she sheds.”

“Yeah well, I’ll want the company. The cat stays here.” He reached forward and took the carrier from her hand and walked back into the dining room. She knew it was futile to argue and she wasn’t going to terrify poor Toffee by screaming and fighting over her. She went out to the car and drove away, wondering what the hell was wrong with her because her serious cohabiting relationship was over but really she was only upset about losing her cat.

Veronica and Archie had been kind even though they didn’t understand why she would have left Simon. From their point of view he was an ideal boyfriend for her, generous and indulgent. Betty and Simon were both interested in the same things, literature, good restaurants, skiing. She could hardly tell them that she’d had the best orgasm of her life by pretending that he was Jughead so she just said that they’d grown apart and she didn’t think long distance would work for them. She wasn’t sad about the relationship being over but she found she regretted the wasted years. Archie drove over to the house for her and collected a carload of belongings that Simon had packed into boxes but even though Archie asked nicely he still wouldn’t surrender Toffee. Perhaps it was for the best. She could hardly take her to England anyway. She paid for a storage unit and didn’t even bother to unpack. Six weeks later she was in Caldbeck, shivering and crying and wallowing in self pity.

As always in moments of existential crisis she needed to see Jug’s face, so she video called and he picked up at once. He was at his desk in his apartment, books jostling for position on the crowded shelves behind him, a complicated plot diagram on a whiteboard propped against the wall. He pulled a pencil from between his teeth and she could tell that he’d been dragging his fingers through his hair in frustration a moment earlier. “Hey Betts. How’s Cumbria? What time is it there?”

“Just after seven. It’s cold and wet and lonely and I’m sad.” As she spoke there was a burst of movement at the side of the screen, something pale and blurry against his laptop camera. “Wait, Jug, that’s not…”

He smiled and moved the laptop so she could see Toffee nudging her pink nose against the microphone where she’d heard Betty’s voice. She called out “Toffee, Toffs, oh honey I miss you so much. Jug, how is she with you? What happened?”

“Well I thought you seemed worried about her so I went up and saw Simon and he agreed it’d be better if I looked after her for you until you come home.”

“He agreed? What did you do to him?”

“Nothing. Sweets and I went round and asked and he put her in her carrier and I brought her home.” He reddened slightly at the suspicious way she was looking at him. “Okay, look, sometimes we carry brass knuckles, just for protection. I guess it might look threatening to someone who doesn’t know what gentle guys we are. Maybe. Anyway she’s here and we’re roomies now. It’s actually kinda nice.”

They talked and laughed and she felt tender and heartsore when Toffee clambered onto Jug’s shoulder purring so loudly that Betty could hear the rumble through the laptop microphone. Eventually Jug glanced at the clock on the screen and began to stand up. “Sorry Betts, I have to get going. I’m meeting a journo.”

“An interview? For the book?” she asked.

“Yeah kinda. We actually did the interview yesterday but she said it’d be good to meet up for a drink in case she needed to follow up on anything. But let’s do this again yeah? So you can check in on your little pal.” As he stood she saw that he had a piece of plastic wrap on his forearm.

“Jug? Is that a new tattoo? What is it? I thought I was your consultant.”

“Yeah, I wanted to mark the release of the book. Draw a line under that I guess.” He held his arm up to the camera so she could see it but she couldn’t make it out clearly. “It says El mayor castigo, “the greatest punishment” in Spanish. Anyway, gotta jet. See you soon. Keep warm,” and he was gone, her phone screen blank.

She made yet another cup of tea and retired to the cold bedroom far from the warmth of the stove even though it was still early enough that back home she’d have been choosing between Korean barbecue and Lebanese for dinner. She wore socks and pulled a sweater over her pyjamas. She thought about how he must have hired a car and driven at least eight hours to get Toffee and bring her home, longer if he’d detoured to pick up Sweetpea. He really was the best best friend. If anything the call had made her miss him even more with his kind heart and his random tattoos and his messy room. She felt suspicious of the journalist who told the subject that she was so bad at her job that she’d need a follow up interview in a bar. What was her deal?

In an effort to distract herself she turned her attention to the reason that she wasn’t in New York to protect him from this so-called journalist, her ancestor Eliza. As a girl when she had first started to excel in her classes her mother had told her stories about the five times great aunt who had her writing published in newspapers and magazines way back in the 1850s and who would probably have been an important writer if she’d lived longer. She’d given her one of the essays to read, photocopied because the original clipping was too delicate to be removed from its tissue paper wrapping in the huge photograph album. Perhaps that was why she’d specialised in Victorian writers in college, the Brontës, George Elliot, Gaskell, Barrett Browning, Braddon. Now she wanted to make a serious study of Eliza Furnivall, collect her works, learn about her life, bring her out of obscurity. She pulled out her laptop and reread the essay that had started the whole odyssey, recovering her sense of purpose. As she read she realised she was humming to herself. She couldn’t place the tune that was lodged in her head. She forced it aside and read the essay.

> _The Cumberland Journal May 1860_  
>  _I have two loves apart from those sympathetic hearts that beat a rhythm so in accordance with my own. I love the fells of my Cumberland home and I love words. These two passions might seem disparate to some unfamiliar with the majesty, mysticism and magnificence with which they bless their acolytes. Let me turn first to the landscape that greets me each day when I have laid down the chalk and the hand bell that are the tools of my labour._
> 
> _When I speak of landscape some readers might conceive of some fixed and perpetual scene, the same now as when it sprang from the Creator’s hand. This is not true of the Cumberland fells. They have been my home for all of my four and twenty years and I have never seen them the same twice. As I walk out from the schoolhouse on a winter evening, the snow sprinkled over the peaks glinting with the reflected colours of the tawny sky I can hardly conceive that this is the same world I encountered when the August heather’s purples met the orange of a sunset that promised fair skies long into an Indian summer as M. de Crèvecoeur terms it. Soon, I know, the snow that keeps me from the high peaks will retreat and in its place the new grass will spring under my feet and the viridescent mosses will spread over the deep, dark bogs. I could look at the mosses for a lifetime, tiny verdant forests, each so various and distinct. With the spring come the wild flowers, twayblade, heartsease, cranesbill and speedwell. Our flowers are small and slight and easily overlooked and yet a little attention and care rewards us with such beauty and subtlety that the heart cannot but gladden. In summer to lie on a bed of springy moorland grass, look into the sky, cloudless and cornflower blue, and hear the skylark as it soars and yet to never spy the minstrel is a pleasure which drives sadness far away no matter one’s troubles or fears. The song is always there even when the singer seems so distant._
> 
> _Words are similarly of great comfort to even a sorrowing heart. When a dear companion is far distant and their hand cannot be clasped in friendship and fellow feeling, to receive their words, their dear familiar script is of singular consolation. To hear their words, chosen with taste and discretion from so many, is as a posy of those small, demure wildflowers. To choose my own in return, to convey my affection and respect without ostentation or self regard is a treasured discipline. Words that express our feelings and thoughts, that give of our hearts and souls, are truly the most precious and intimate gifts. Our Lord requires not the burnt offering of pagan years, He accepts from us the offering of our prayers and hymns, our words. Our friendships are bound together with our words, even that closest bond is tied with a vow. “I plight thee my troth,” says the bride and her bridegroom before the altar and by the magical power of those oaths the world is altered. Words then both express the world and create it anew. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” we are told in Holy Scripture. Our redemption is effected by the word, our friendships sealed by a word, our families bound by them._
> 
> _I live then by the landscape and by the word. Mine is the small and unregarded life of a village schoolmistress and yet my words reach out far from me into a world which I shall never see, broadcast like the seed scattered by the sower. Some, no doubt, fall onto stony ground but if a word or two that I have cast abroad should grow to strength and nourish the future then my efforts have been worthwhile. “The sower sows the word.”_  
>  _Eliza Furnivall_

That night she dreamed that she was walking on the fells in a rainstorm. She pulled up the back of the floor length tweed gown she was wearing and tugged the skirt over her head to shield herself from the pounding raindrops. Her legs were covered by long drawers and layers of petticoats and thick stockings, soaked through with rain and mud from the saturated path. All those garments seemed designed to hobble her, slowing her progress and tripping her when she tried to run. She struggled down the treacherous path, slipping a little on the loose rocks. Eventually she saw the cottage, the cottage in which she dreamed, its windows cheery and welcoming with yellow light. She ran to the door, hammering for admittance but it remained closed to her. She ran to the side of the building and looked through the window into the kitchen. Jug was inside, warming those elegant hands of his by the stove. He looked up at her as she placed her palms on the glass and shook his head sadly as she called “Jug. Juggie, let me in. I’m so sorry I died.” He stood up and said quite clearly in someone else’s voice, “Too late lassie. You’re almost two centuries too late,” turned and walked away, leaving her outside in the cold rain on the empty hillside.


	2. If The Spirit Waits In Check, Help Me Let It Go

> _The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant road, — were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow._
> 
> _They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them._
> 
> George Eliot from _The Mill on the Floss_

The next morning Betty was up with the lark to stand under a shower that would have more aptly been called a dribble, such was the poverty of the water pressure. She had an appointment with the vicar who held the key to the old schoolhouse where Eliza had taught until she left for Switzerland. Perhaps it was sentimental to want to see the vicarage where Eliza had grown up and the schoolhouse where she had, in all probability, contracted the disease that eventually ended her life but, before she immersed herself in the papers held by the university in Carlisle, she wanted to have a sense of this young woman and her world. The thought occurred to her that she was fleeing into Eliza’s life to escape from the messy confusion of her own. The short, uneventful existence of an unmarried village schoolmistress who’d lived with her parents for her whole life, only leaving for that final painful journey to Switzerland seemed so much less fraught than the tangled web of relationships she’d woven to imprison herself. She looked out of the window to see that there had been fresh snowfall in the night so she dressed practically in jeans and a heavy sweater, pulling her boots back on, having learned that Cumbria was not the place to wear sneakers. 

A few minutes later she stood on the doorstep at the vicarage and looked suspiciously at what she guessed was a doorbell. There was an enamel and brass protuberance that said ‘pull’ so, channelling Alice in Wonderland who always recklessly obeyed written instructions, she tugged. The knob pulled away from its back plate alarmingly and she heard a bell ringing on the other side of the oak. She waited, nervously uncertain of the etiquette involved in meeting an English vicar. Was she supposed to curtsey or make the sign of the cross or something? The door was wrenched open by a woman in rubber boots and a muddy smock, her greying hair in a loose bun that had several leaves and twigs trapped in it. “Morning, Miss Cooper yes?” she said breathlessly. “You’ll have to wait for us a moment I’m afraid. The bloody dog has chased the chickens all over the garden and it’s bedlam. Himself is in his carpet slippers trying to gather them up but he’s fallen on his arse in the snow three times. He’ll break his neck in a minute. I’m Prudence, the wife. Just take a seat in here will you? With you in a tick.” She was gone before Betty could ask if she should come back later or help or go away and stop being a nuisance. 

She’d been ushered into a pleasantly old fashioned room with threadbare floral fabrics fraying on deep armchairs and an open fire that actually gave out real heat. There were overflowing bookcases and occasional tables with china ornaments, antimacassars on the seat backs and many rather smudgy and joyless paintings on the walls. She wandered the room, looking at the pictures, wondering if it would be rude to quietly let herself out and go back to the cottage. One of the pictures stood out from the rest. It showed the vicarage itself, and she imagined that inside those painted walls was another Betty looking at a painted vicarage and inside that…She smiled at the whimsy. There was a yell from the garden and she turned to the full length window to see an elderly man chasing a chicken through a snowy flowerbed and... 

_a small girl in a blue dress with a white pinafore ran in through the closed door, giggling. Betty couldn’t move. There was something flat and unnatural about the scene, as if it were being projected onto the air in front of her. She tore her eyes from the child to the window to see that the garden was in full verdant flower and a golden sun smiled onto the lawns. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to reset whatever had gone wrong with her mind. The child appeared not to see her at all, running behind an upright couch that hadn’t been in the room Betty walked into moments before. There was the sound of another set of running footsteps in the hallway and a scruffy, dark haired boy flung himself into the room, panting and looking around anxiously. He looked so much like Jughead back in middle school that she realised she must be having some sort of waking dream. There was her playmate, untidy hair and a furrowed brow. “Eliza, you know I’m not allowed indoors. It’ll be the slipper for you if they catch us and I’ll be whipped again,” he hissed in an accent that she didn't recognise._

_The girl stood up from behind the couch looking guilty. “I’m sorry Jock. I forgot. Look I’ll find the book and we’ll go back outside. If we take it to the orchard no-one will even know we have it. You're so clever you’ll know your letters in no time at all.”_

_“Much good it’ll do me in the pit. Too dark to read books down there anyway.”_

_“Don’t be such a sour puss. That’s a whole year away. I want you to read to me instead of it always being me doing the work. Come along, I have the book.” She snatched his hand and they ran together out through the closed door and their footsteps rang out down the hallway._

Betty blinked and her eyes opened to the sight of the septuagenarian still pursuing the fowl through a herbaceous border, snow on the ground, the furniture as it had been when she entered the room. She sank into an armchair as her knees gave way beneath her.

She was in exactly the same position ten minutes later when the vicar made an appearance. “Sorry to keep you waiting…Are you quite well dear? You look terribly pale.”

She recovered herself a little, embarrassed to tell this kindly man of the cloth that she’d seen a ghost in his parlour. “Yes, sorry, I didn’t sleep well, jet-lag I guess. I’m fine, just a tiny bit dizzy.” It was probably just a stress thing, like a vivid daydream she told herself. It almost certainly wasn’t a brain tumour or incipient psychosis, almost certainly not that. He was speaking again and she clutched onto his words as if they were a life preserver. If she could focus everything would be fine.

“Well I apologise for the circus that you walked into. Prudence insists on keeping a menagerie and we have these occasional outbreaks of chaos. Still, all’s well now. So, Eliza Furnivall is your interest I believe.”

“Yes, she was my distant relative. I’ve always wanted to know about her so my idea is to see if there’s anything interesting to write about her for my PhD thesis and perhaps even a book. I'm hoping that she might have met or at least corresponded with other writers. Her papers were all bequeathed to the university in Carlisle so I’ll drive over there tomorrow and see what's there. I’ve rented a cottage in the village to try to understand her a little so I’d love to see the school if I may.”

He gave a rueful smile. “Dilapidated I’m afraid. It closed in the nineties when there weren’t enough village children to make it worth the cost of a teacher. They all go to Wigton on the bus these days. There was some talk of making it a community centre but there’s not much of a community anymore sadly. Most of the houses are holiday lets for walkers and the pub went a few years ago. Anyway I have a key so we can stroll over when we’ve had a cup of tea and I’ll let you have a good look. I expect you’d like to see her room but I’m afraid we’ve got one of our waifs and strays in there just at present. I’m loath to disrupt. But remind me next time you’re passing. There’s a rather pretty watercolour by her up there. Oh and I expect you saw her painting of the vicarage here?”

Betty told him that she had but didn’t dare to look at it again. She said she’d very much like to see the room some day and gulped her scalding cup of tea as soon as Prudence brought it to her, the sooner to get out of the vicarage which seemed strangely insubstantial now she’d seen that other place behind it or alongside it. She had always thought of herself as a rational, analytical person, not given to flights of fancy. She left the wild imaginings to her author friend. Now apparently she had turned into one of those unfortunate, sensitive people who saw ghosts and suffered panic attacks. She really couldn’t go back to being the girl she had been in high school with her anxiety and her over reliance on prescription pills.

The panic attack had happened the week before she left the States. She’d met Jughead, finally back from the book tour, at a dark bar in the East Village where none of the furniture or glassware matched because that was where one met one’s celebrated novelist pals, apparently. All the way into the city to meet him she’d been thinking about the last night she slept with Simon, worrying the recollection around in her mind, unable to drop it. She’d been thinking about Jughead in that moment with Simon. She didn’t feel ready to face what it meant but the thought was in her head, driving her crazy. It had been like when she had her wisdom tooth extracted, she’d been fixated on the awful gap at the back of her jaw, unable to prevent her tongue reaching back to it. That had ended very badly. She’d dislodged the clot and given herself dry socket. There had been terrible agony and the most awful taste in her mouth and days of strong painkillers that made her dissociative and crazy. Now she kept thinking about Simon’s accusation, that deep down she'd always wanted Jug. She experimented, making it true, thinking of him like that, her hand reaching under his shirt, his lips on hers, imagining herself getting ready for a date with heart skipping excitement. She was aware that she was affected by those thoughts, aroused even. If she didn’t pull herself together then she’d be risking her most important connection now that Simon was out of the picture. She had to stop it. When she got to the bar he was already there, a spiral bound notebook on the table, his black slanted handwriting filling the page as his hand moved rapidly from line to line. She watched for a second, enjoying the fluency with which he wrote, and then she stepped over to stand next to him until he noticed her and looked up with a beaming smile. “Betts! Hi, let me get you a drink.”

“No, you finish your thought. I’d hate to go down in history as another person from Porlock. Shall I get you something? IPA?” He grinned again and winked before turning back to the page. He’d closed the book by the time she returned from the bar. He passed her a leaving gift with a shy smile and she had pulled the hat on in the bar making him laugh affectionately. They talked about her trip, about his latest book, about a couple of dates he’d been on which he claimed to have hated. She wondered if he’d had sex with those girls, wondered if he ever thought of her when he did. Finally she said, “I broke up with Simon. Moved out,” and his jaw dropped.

“Way to bury the lead Betty!” he gasped. “Did he do something? Do I need to hurt him?”

“No, it was me. He was just who he’d always been,” she said with a wry smile.

“Shit. You didn’t say that did you? It’s not you it’s me?”

“No, actually I said I wanted him to be free to meet other people,” she said, with a tiny, guilty giggle.

“Oh Betts, that’s cold. Next time do it by text, much more humane. Seriously though, what happened?”

“I guess I realised that it wasn’t what I really wanted. It wasn’t forever. And then he wouldn’t let me keep Toffee so I think that means I was right.” She smiled sadly. It was still the cat she really missed.

“Oh that’s a complete dick move. He doesn't even like her. He said she sheds. Wow.” He sat back in his booth with a surprised exhalation of breath. “I thought you two would get married for sure. I thought I was about to be the only sad single who couldn’t figure it out. Hey, we can set each other up and go on double dates. I’ve got a friend you’d like, Melodie.”

“Christ Jughead, I just got out of the most serious relationship of my life. I do not want to meet your friend Melodie. I don’t want to go on double dates and watch you suck face with one of your airhead book groupies. Sensitive Jug.”

He stared at her, pale and upset. “Shit Betts, I’m so sorry. I was joking obviously. I apologise. That was absolutely crass. Forgive me?”

She’d smiled as genuinely as she could and put her hand on his. “It’s fine. Let’s talk about something else.” So they talked about Eliza Furnivall, her life and her essays and her work as a teacher, Jug always amazed by Betty’s carefully documented family tree in her mother's huge leather bound family bible.

“I can’t imagine being able to pick up something that some, what, five times great aunt?” She nodded, “A five times great anything had touched. To have her essays, something she wrote, to be able to get into her head is amazing. It’s like being able to meet her. You’re lucky to have that.”

“Did you read the essay I sent you?”

He nodded. “It’s good. A bit god bother-y but I guess that was the vibe in those days. Some nice imagery. I liked the moss bit.”

She grinned at him. She’d felt exactly the same way about the essay when she’d read it although she’d also thought there was something sad and longing about it. Projecting probably. That was certainly not something she wanted to get into with him. “You never talk about your family tree. Where are your people from? What do you know?”

“There’s some story about a some great grandfather coming from Scotland to go on the stage. That’s the origin story for the fucking name. It lies dormant for a generation and then someone inflicts it on us again. I know nothing about the house of Jones though, wouldn’t know where to start or what horrors I’d dig up, probably just a long line of crooks and lushes.”

“Well there are generations of Coopers listed in the family bible and not one of them did anything of note except Eliza who gets four words in the biographical dictionary of English writers, one of which is “and” and another is “minor” so maybe a Scottish thespian shows there’s a bit more pizazz in the Jones lineage. And now there’s you of course with your literary awards and your New York Times bestseller. Your great great grandchildren will know all about you.”

“That would imply that there is any way a human woman would permit someone with no discernible social skills to impregnate her, which on my current showing is blindingly unlikely.” He grinned but she wondered if he really was lonely. He always joked about the serious stuff.

They laughed about families and relationships until it was time for her to head back to Veronica and Archie’s place in Great Neck. She reached out for her coat but he put his hand on her arm and said, “Or you could stay.” Her stomach somersaulted and she looked up into his eyes sharply. Had she given herself away with an incautious look or gesture. How had he guessed that she wanted nothing more than to wake up in his arms, stroke back his hair and kiss him to wakefulness? He laughed abruptly, “I mean on the couch, Save yourself the late night drunks on the train. I wasn’t propositioning you, obviously. Did I make that creepy?”

She managed a laugh but it sounded hollow even to her. “No, course not. I didn’t think you meant… No, anyway thanks but I have a thing tomorrow so I need to get back. But definitely let’s video call and talk while I’m away, yeah? I’ll need you to read to me when I can’t sleep like you used to. Be good.”

“Always. I love you Coop.” Somehow the word “love” hurt her more than if he’d just said “See ya,” and left. He loved her. Her and artisanal burgers, her and the music of Jeff Rosenstock, her and Tarantino movies, her and IPA. He loved her in the wrong way and all at once it felt worse than if they’d never met up.

She smiled through the turmoil “I love you too Juggie. See you.”

She’d made it to the train but then felt herself losing control. It had felt like when Simon was teaching her to ski, her legs sliding out from under her, her centre of balance shifting despite her best efforts and then the stomach churning certainty that there was nothing she could do except hope that she wouldn’t smash into a tree and break her neck. She couldn’t seem to breathe in, her lungs felt hard and inflexible. Dark spots began to appear in her field of vision. She thought she might die, that she was having a heart attack. Then she remembered helping Polly breathe through panics like this and, even though everything in her body was screaming that she needed to gasp in more air, she made herself blow her breath out slowly through pursed lips. It took thirty minutes for her heart rate to slow to anything close to normal and she was shaken for a couple of days by the reemergence of anxiety that she thought she’d beaten years ago.

In Cumbria ten days later Betty and Reverend Fenwick trudged in grey slush and snow through a village that made Betty feel unsettled and out of sorts. Many of the houses looked like they were sets from a Jane Austen box set but then there would be something jarring, a playground so full of trash that it looked like it belonged in a zombie movie, a buzzing sodium streetlight, a knot of kids with scooters and hoodies outside a drab convenience store. She was finding the dissonance jarring. As they walked he told her something about the history of the village. 

“We’re a pretty insignificant little place now but when Eliza lived here it had twice the population. There were textile mills and bobbin factories instead of just people who drive into the village on a Friday with their labradors and their expensive mountain bikes and leave again on Sunday night. You can see the factory ruins if you take a walk along the beck, the river that is. The cold beck is what the village is named for. And there was mining too. Copper and lead up towards the fells and then coal too in the nineteenth century. And coal mines and mills bring workers so there were new communities, Welsh and Scottish folks for the mines, Yorkshire and Lancashire people for the mills. So it might look like a rural idyll now but this was actually an industrial town. Coal dust and pit whistles, factory machinery chuntering at all hours, Welsh and Gaelic spoken in the streets. A bustling, dirty, noisy place. And no school because primary education wasn’t compulsory until…”

“1870,” Betty supplied. 

“Yes, sorry. I forgot you were a scholar. The children weren’t supposed to be in the pits or the mills until they were nine or ten years old but they often were. So no school until Eliza persuaded her father and the local bishop and a landowner to let her establish one in 1857, a free school, ragged schools they were called back then, that she ran even though she was only twenty and had never had a day of classes in her life. She seems like she was a force of nature, unstoppable, until the consumption stopped her of course. And here we are.”

They stood in front of a slightly forbidding stone building surrounded by a cracked and weed strewn asphalt yard. Most of the windows were boarded up. Her companion produced a massive iron key and, with some effort and a shoulder barge, pushed the heavy oak door open. Some of the windows at the rear had been left unsecured and were smashed. The interior was scattered with fallen leaves and empty bottles and a dead bird or two. The open door allowed in some light and Betty stepped cautiously into the large schoolroom. As she did there was an insistent buzzing and the vicar pulled out an incongruously up to date iPhone. “I’m sorry my dear. I have parishioner who is not expected to last the day. I need to go to her. Why don’t you hold onto the key? Lock up when you’ve finished and drop it off at the vicarage when you’re passing. There’s no rush. Put it through the letterbox if we aren’t about.”

“Thank you so much pastor...I mean father... 

“Geoffrey, please,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not the Pope. Prudence would have something to say about that! Take care now, I’m not sure how safe these old floors are. Sunday service is at ten a.m. if you’re interested, if not, do pop by anytime for a cup of tea or a sherry. We’re very ecumenical.” With that and a wave of his hand, either in farewell or benediction, he was gone, leaving Betty alone in the echoing damp and draughty schoolroom with only the occasional flutter of wings from the rafters for company. 

She edged around the room, heedful of his warning about the floorboards, coughing occasionally as the dust rose up from her footsteps. There were cheap melamine cupboards piled in one corner, some old wooden shelves in another, dust and cobwebs everywhere. At the back of the space under a large, stained glass window, that would have been impressive if the light was able to shine through it, there was a huge freestanding chalkboard. She ran her fingers over the dark wood frame and noticed something rough. Using the light from her phone she was able to see a set of initials crudely carved into the wooded frame “FP 1857.” Typical of an FP to be careless of the school’s property, she smiled, remembering the time that her own FPJ had almost set fire to their middle school. She shivered and sneezed and decided that, unsurprisingly, walls couldn’t talk and there was really nothing to be learned from this crumbling pile of stone and ancient chalk dust. As she reached the door she noticed, in an alcove, an old handbell. She could just imagine Eliza reaching for it to ring her pupils to attention and direct them to file in for their lessons. On a whim she reached up and grabbed the wooden handle, dislodging a flurry of dust and several dead bugs over herself. The clapper struck the side of the bell as she pulled it towards her and...

_her dress would be filthy. She really must find time to sweep the school room properly this week. She’d have Jock move the desks when he came from the pit to work on his German. She opened the door, bracing herself against the icy wind and swung the bell in a great sweep of her arm as a tumble of autumn leaves twirled around her boots. The clapper sounded, loud and true, and her charges pricked up their ears and obediently formed themselves into two neat lines, young ladies on the right, gentlemen on the left. They waited for her instruction and she called out “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. Miss Armstrong please.”_

_The first young lady, her hair tied back with a neat blue ribbon, spectacles on her nose, smiled. “Aristotle, Miss Furnivall.”_

_“Very good Mary. Let us relish those bitter roots. Auf geht's!" She turned and led the way into the schoolroom, replacing the bell in its alcove as she passed._

_She set the little ones to writing out their alphabet in neat letters on their slates and then the older children began with Geography. She had drawn a map of the Black Sea and its environs on the blackboard and she invited pupils up to write in the names of the surrounding nations, Russia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, the Ottoman Empire. There was some dispute as to the location of Moldavia which she resolved by writing it in herself. She asked if anyone understood why a war in the Crimea had been necessary and, when hands and eyes remained lowered, she explained that there were many different types of Christians in those lands and that there was dispute about how best to protect them when most of their neighbours were of a different faith. John noted that the Russians ate babies which led to some discussion of whether one could believe such hateful rumours about other human beings without the evidence of one’s own eyes. She asked Gertrude to wipe the blackboard clean and then wrote up the first stanzas of Mr Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade' and began to recite it with the children so that they might learn it by heart. “Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do…_

__and she was, inexplicably, crumpled on the floor by the chalkboard, covered in dust, coughing painfully. She had no idea how she had come to be there but had to assume that she had moved in a fugue state while in the grip of an hallucination. She supposed she must be having a breakdown, thousands of miles from home, a stranger in a strange land. The coughing subsided but her mind was still wracked. The thought that she couldn’t dismiss was that she certainly had never memorised the entirety of Tennyson’s ode to futile slaughter, except that now when she thought of it for a moment she found herself reciting, “Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell…” She dragged herself to her feet and out of the school, locking the door and finding her way back to the cottage before collapsing on the couch and letting herself sob out her fear and confusion._ _

__Eventually, she sat up, reminded herself that she was Elizabeth “Betty” Cooper and decided that she would not be cowed by ghosts or madness. She just needed to hear a friendly voice, her anchor in times of tumult. She needed Jug._ _

__“Hey Betts, what time is it?” he mumbled on the fifteenth ring._ _

“For you, about eight thirty. Sorry to wake you but shouldn’t you be pounding the keys?” 

“Yeah, well sort of a late one last night. Hold on a sec, let me go into the other room.” Her stomach flipped in slow rolls as she realised that he wasn’t alone. It wasn’t the keys he was going to be pounding. A woman’s voice, low and sleepy murmured something and she gasped to hold in a yelp of pain as her chest constricted. 

“Shit, sorry Jug, no. As you were. I was just checking in. Don’t let me disturb you. Give me a call when you’re free. It’s not urgent at all. Have fun. Be safe,” she hung up without waiting for him to say goodbye. “Be safe?” What the hell was that about? Was she his health class teacher now? 

She needed a distraction from the distressing mental picture of Jug slouching back to bed, naked, taking some other woman, the journalist she supposed, in his arms and kissing her so she searched for, and found, a documentary about the Crimean War on Netflix. She learned that the explanation given in her hallucination had not been complete fantasy if one disregarded some of the global geopolitical shifts which were perhaps easier to see with the benefit of a couple of centuries’ distance. As the light faded outside she drank half a bottle of Sauternes and ate a dry and unappetising cheese sandwich, trying not to imagine Jug and the woman in that sexy bubble that new lovers occupied, learning each other, touching each other, giggling their way from couch to bed, from bed to refrigerator. There was no way she could call him up and ask him to read to her until she fell asleep, that warm deep voice holding her until her troubles drifted far away. Eventually she decided to go to bed with a Xanax, grateful for the prescription that she’d wangled from her doctor by claiming a fear of flying when she was feeling pretty wrung out after her break up with Simon. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eliza calls her young friend “Jock.” Its a nickname for a Scottish person commonly used in England regardless of the person’s given name.
> 
> The person from Porlock is a reference to the unfortunate visitor who interrupted Coleridge when he was writing Kubla Khan, ensuring that it was never completed. Stevie Smith wrote a funny and wonderful poem about the incident, Thoughts about the Person from Porlock. Check it out.


	3. If My Prayer Goes Unanswered, That's Alright

_It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly._

From _Jude the Obscure_ by Thomas Hardy

Waking the next day she felt blurry and insubstantial and it wasn’t until she was in the rental car driving to Carlisle that she even remembered her call to Jughead. Probably Xanax and a heady white wine weren’t the best combo for mental acuity. She didn’t know whether it was the wine, the pills, Jughead’s love life or her probable brain tumour that was making her so incapable of focus. She thought maybe, if she could throw herself into the academic work, things would sort themselves out around her. That had worked before. If she knew all that was to be known about Eliza maybe her mind wouldn’t need to indulge in a weird psychosis to fabricate her anymore.

At the university she felt more herself. She understood the rules and conventions of an academic community so it was a home away from home. She made contact with the archivist who was in charge of Eliza’s papers and found that she had already brought the materials up from the deep, dark, climate controlled depths in readiness for Betty’s visit so they drank a cup of vending machine coffee in Sandra’s office and discussed Eliza. “I skimmed through just to see what we had. She seems pretty great but I think it was kind of a sad life. Her fiancé drowned you know. And she just taught at the village school until she got too sick to continue with it. Heartbroken I suppose."

Betty wanted to know all about this previously unsuspected fiancé and Sandra pulled out a newspaper clipping marked with a date in September 1860 to show her.

> **Viscount Morpeth. Peregrine, eldest son and heir of Lord Landridge of Henderskelfe drowned most tragically in Bassenthwaite Lake last Thursday. It is thought that he had essayed a swim across the lake near the country estate at Swirethorne Manor as he had done on many occasions, being a strong and athletic young man in his prime of life. On this occasion the water seems to have been unusually cold and it is thought that his heart was unequal to the considerable effort. He leaves a fiancée, Miss Eliza Furnivall of Caldbeck, as well as his grieving family. His younger brother Basil becomes Viscount Morpeth in his brother’s place.**

**  
**

Betty tried to imagine the blow that had befallen Eliza. To be engaged, in love, and to lose her betrothed before their marriage was a terrible blow for a young woman, especially in the days when an engagement was the best way to secure her path through the world. For her beloved to have drowned was a horrifying thing. She felt almost tearful but ascribed her emotional weakness to the ill-advised alcohol and sedative cocktail the night before. She wouldn’t repeat that mistake. Eliza, after all, had brushed herself down and gone back to teaching after her disappointment and the same stoic blood must run in Betty's veins. She took one of the document boxes into a quiet reading room and proceeded to sort through the flotsam of Eliza’s life, photographing pages of essays and letters for later perusal. She came upon another newspaper cutting which had been carefully folded and tied around with a piece of lace “University College London Gazette” was written in brownish ink at the top of the sheet and the page recorded those students who had been awarded Bachelors Degrees in 1861. She searched the names, looking for a Peregrine or a Furnivall and finding nothing but then her pen fell clattering to the floor and she pushed back from the desk in stunned surprise. One of the graduates was Forsythe Pendleton of Caldbeck, Cumberland. She wondered if this was another hallucination and walked away from the desk for a moment before returning to check again. She had explored only one of the three large boxes that Sandra had brought from the archive but she was too shocked and confused by the clipping to be trusted with irreplaceable documents. She photographed the page, packed away the papers and returned them to Sandra’s office with a wave and a thin smile and stepped out of the library into the low winter sunshine, pulling on her hat as she shivered a little. 

She wanted to call him again to tell him what she had found but she couldn’t have borne it if some Amanda or Andrea had been giggling in the background, standing in his kitchen, wearing his shirt, kissing his shoulder while his boring, neurotic friend called him again from England because she couldn’t go two days without him. He hadn’t called her back so he was still probably screwing like it was the last days of the Roman Empire, having a great time, lithe and sinewy, imaginative and open minded, making Anthea come first, over and over probably. She drew in a shaking breath. She really did seem to be spiralling. She wondered if this was the start of one of those adult onset mental illnesses, porphyria or dementia maybe. Perhaps the sudden decision to leave her home and her boyfriend was symptomatic of her illness. Recklessness and impulsivity did seem to be her defining characteristics these days. Soon she’d be screaming and biting like Bertha Rochester and someone would have to tie her down for her own good. She should probably see a doctor but she had no idea how that worked here. Maybe she could ask Prudence when she dropped off the key to the school. “Hi Prudence, I seem to be losing my mind. What would you recommend?” She drove back to the cottage and drank the other half of the bottle of wine but, thinking of her aunt Eliza, she flushed the rest of the pills before they became a problem.

She fell into a routine of driving to the university in the morning, working on the archive until lunchtime and then returning to the cottage and spending the afternoon walking or driving around the area, familiarising herself with Eliza’s world. She was aware she was avoiding an inevitable confrontation with reality but as long as she kept letting Jughead’s calls go to voicemail she need not hear any details about how great Anaïs or Alexandra was. In terms of the thesis the most interesting find was a couple of letters from Mrs Gaskell, encouraging Eliza’s literary efforts. They had been overlooked because they were signed only “E. G.” but Betty recognised the Plymouth Grove address. She should have been excited but she was too preoccupied by Jug’s love life and her own probable brain disease. One afternoon, in need of a more engaging distraction she checked the name of the fiancé’s home, called up directions to Swirethorne Manor on her phone and drove off in search of Eliza’s tragic love story.

The manor house loomed up, grey and imposing, at the end of a long, rather overgrown driveway. It seemed to be making a vainglorious attempt to block out the sun. Two wings jutted aggressively from a main hall. The windows were small and mullioned but the house was more Gothic Revival than authentically ancient. She wondered why anyone would have built something quite so sinister. She parked outside and scrambled for her university identity card and the letter of introduction from her professor at Cornell. She rang another of the strange doorbells, expecting a liveried footman to swing open the door. Instead it was a young woman, her curly hair tied in a bright scarf and yellow paint on her nose. “Hi, oh you aren’t the curtains are you?”

Betty smiled, “No, sorry, I’m not the curtains.” She considered going for the “pull yourself together joke” but it seemed entirely too cringey so she explained herself. “I’m a university researcher. I’m writing about a minor essayist called Eliza Furnivall who was engaged to a man who lived in this house in the 1850s, Peregrine Morpeth. I just wondered if I might have a look around the grounds. Local colour. Take a few pictures.”

“Oh sure. Will there be a book or anything? We just bought this albatross. We’re going to try to make it a spa place. All publicity is good publicity, and all that. Oh shit!” A paint covered hand flew up to her face, "Peregrine? I think we’ve got a painting of your boy. Come with me. I’m Lucy by the way.”

“Betty. Thanks so much. Are you sure I’m not putting you out?”

“Christ no, not at all. I’m so over renovations. This was all Stu’s idea so let him get on with it I say. It’s funny actually. I think the picture’s an Arthur Hatcham. There’s an engraved plate on the back that gives the subject’s name but not the artist’s. It was in one of the barns and it’s not catalogued anywhere but we’re going to get it appraised when we get a minute. If it is by him it’ll pay for the roof.” Betty had no idea who Arthur Hatcham was but if the painting would roof this huge place she supposed he must be a big deal. Lucy was still talking. “ You’re American?”

“Guilty. The essayist, Furnivall, was actually an ancestor though, so I’m not appropriating her. Well only a little.” 

Lucy laughed. “I did art history at uni. There was a lot of that kind of thing about.” She stopped abruptly before one of the paintings, “Here we are.”

Betty looked up into a pair of kind brown eyes and knew him at once.

Lucy was gesturing towards the painting, “This is your…

_“Peregrine?” she laughed. “Like the bird?” She seemed to be twelve or thirteen this time. Peregrine was perhaps a year older, just in that gawky growth spurt where boys are like foals, not really in charge of their limbs._

_“I know it’s absurd. It was an ancestor’s name when Henry was king. I’m the heir and Father wishes me to grow up knightly and brave. Would you care to go down to the lake? It’s my favourite place in all the world.”_

_She nodded and he took her hand as they ran out over the lawns to the lake shore. She was glad to have a friend other than Jock because he was always at the pit nowadays so that they barely saw each other even on Sundays. When they did meet he was tired and sore and angry. He didn’t realise that she had to creep away from the house to meet him because her mama said it was not seemly for the vicar’s daughter to be seen alone with a working man. She laughed at that. He wasn’t a man. He was Jock. She still loved him better than anyone of course, no amount of dirt and ill temper would ever change that, but she had been lonely lately. Now that Peregrine’s papa had inherited the title and his family had come from London to live in Cumberland, she had a friend who didn’t have to spend his days underground and only emerge exhausted and furious when it was already too late to play outdoors._

…fella.”

She must have stumbled or swayed because Lucy’s arm was at her back. “Hey are you okay? You look so pale. Come on. Tea and biscuits are called for.” 

Betty made a good show of normalcy as she sat in a beautifully proportioned but rather shabby drawing room and drank what Lucy called builders’ tea from a huge ceramic mug and ate the rather dusty, hard discs that passed for cookies in England. Lucy’s boyfriend Stu joined them looking harassed, with dust in his hair. He admitted that the place needed more work that they had ever anticipated and Lucy slapped him, saying “You, more than **you** anticipated, you dope. I was well aware.” They were a good couple, making each other laugh, both bragging to Betty about their partner’s strengths. She liked them. She pushed what had just happened from her mind so that they didn’t decide she was a crazy person and call the local asylum and have her put away like poor Anne Catherick. She began to suspect that what ailed her was metaphysical rather than mental anyway. She was seriously considering the possibility that she was being haunted. She drove away with a standing invitation to dinner, a sense that she might have made some friends and a terrible sense of the uncanny that kept her recalling Freud’s definition, “the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Every time she had one of these episodes it felt as if it were a recollection not a revelation. 

Back at the cottage, she lit the stove and made a fire upstairs in the bedroom fireplace. On her way in she had picked up a box from the porch and she tore open the wrapping to find a note from Prudence along with a garishly coloured knitted object. “Miss Cooper, I expect you are finding our Cumbrian February rather a slog. I don’t know if you have these in “the colonies” (haha) but fill it with hot water and your evenings will be transformed. The hot water bottle is one of life’s great comforts, along with a good husband but I can supply only the former. I’m sorry this one is so very ugly, but taste is not a strong suit with me. Warmest (haha) regards, Prudence and Geoffrey.” Betty followed the instructions and found that, if she crawled under her blankets in thick socks with the hot water bottle in its rather inexpertly knitted cover, a cup of tea to one side of her and the bedroom fireplace well stocked with coals and crackling to the other, she felt positively comfortable. She allowed herself to review her experiences since she had arrived in Cumbria. Whether it was hallucination or some kind of telepathy she seemed to be glimpsing Eliza’s life. In the schoolroom and at Swirethorne she had been someone else, who could it be except Eliza? It was research of a kind she supposed. She could try to learn something. She thought of Jock, imagining a little boy, a baby, in the dark cold of a pit, coal gas, floods, cave-ins. It was unthinkable. Then poor Peregrine, her other playmate who would become her fiancé and then drown in the lake by whose shores she had driven that afternoon. Eliza had remained a village schoolmistress and written essays about moss and skylarks until her death in Switzerland. As she meditated on the three lives, so long over, her phone rang and she saw that it was Jughead. She rejected the call and switched off her phone, still unequal to the task of making small talk about his love life, and settled down to sleep.

Back at the library the following week she found a bundle of letters in the archive. At the top of the pile there was an envelope on which someone had written ‘Peregrine, Visc. Morpeth’ and which she opened first. Inside was a letter on headed notepaper from University College London with a lengthy Latin motto dominating the page. She copied it carefully into her phone and then transcribed the translation in her notes, “Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward.” The letter, from a provost of the university, thanked his lordship for the generous gift of a scholarship, endowed for the entire tuition and modest living expenses of a Cumberland student of humble origins and informed him that said scholarship had been awarded to a scholar from Caldbeck who was an autodidact and who had worked as a collier since he was eleven years old. He had been put forward by a local clergyman for the award and was already demonstrating prodigious literary talent. As per his lordship’s request, the source of the award had remained confidential. The letter was accompanied in the next envelope by a note in a rather scrawling and untidy hand, and Betty took the best part of half an hour to decode its few lines.

> _“My dear betrothed,  
>  Lord, how it makes me laugh to so address you! Here is the communication I received last year from the university. I hope he is spending my money to greater benefit than I disposed of my father’s at Cambridge. I thought that you might enjoy the description of your pupil as “prodigious.”. Personally I have found him more accomplished with fists than words but evidently I have not seen him at his best. All is as you desired. Arthur and I look forward to our Italian sojourn after the ceremony. Are you quite sure you would not like to invite your friend? You will be Viscountess Morpeth. No scandal could be attached to you I assure you. Until the great day my dear bride to be,  
>  Peregrine.”_

There was one further sheet of paper in a sloping, fluent hand that she felt like she recognised.

> _My esteemed Lord or Lady,_  
>  _I write to convey my humblest gratitude for your great generosity in bestowing the scholarship of which I am honoured to be the beneficiary. I shall endeavour to employ my great good fortune in the service of God and my fellow man._
> 
> _My father was a collier at Caldbeck pit until his death and I was set to similar employment before I was twelve years old. I would, in all likelihood, have died in the pit since I was an egregiously unskilful and inattentive collier. I was taught my letters by Miss Furnivall, the village schoolmistress in Caldbeck, who took a kind interest in my betterment before there was even a school in the village. I am reading for the Bachelor of Arts degree, hearing lectures in logic and moral philosophy as well as botany, history, modern and ancient languages and mathematics. I believe that with my degree I will be in a position to support myself and, if I should be so blessed, a family of my own. It is my dearest ambition to write for the stage._
> 
> _I hope that my benefactor will not find me impertinent if I dare to proffer my best wishes for your very good health. It is my most fervent wish that at some future date I will be permitted to offer my thanks in person._
> 
> _Your humble and obedient servant_
> 
> _Forsythe Pendleton Esq_

Betty tried to read between the lines of the documents before her. Peregrine had bestowed a scholarship on Forsythe anonymously, apparently at the request of his bride to be. That was surely a generous gift to a beloved spouse. But who was Arthur? And what scandal might Eliza have feared? And why could Eliza not have told her protégé that he was to be the beneficiary of her future husband’s generosity? She picked up the envelope to replace the papers but as she did so something fell from a corner of the folded paper to rest on the desk. It was a curl of coal black hair tied with a navy blue ribbon. She picked it up and was transported in time yet again but not this time to a Victorian Caldbeck but rather in her own memory. She remembered reaching forward on many occasions to brush such a curl from the eyes of her own Forsythe. Aware that what she was doing broke every rule of scholarship, she slipped the curl into her pocket, stroking its softness tenderly between her fingers and thinking of Jug.

Back at the cottage a free trial on a genealogy website soon revealed a birth certificate for a Forsythe Pendleton and a possible death notice in a newspaper archive. She clicked to learn that he had been born in 1835, a year before Eliza’s birth, in Cammuslang, a village near Glasgow and that his death was recorded in the New York Tribune in 1890. It seemed churlish and perverse to deny the possibility of a connection to Jug any longer. She steeled herself and texted her friend. “Can you talk?”

He video called her right back from his place so he’d obviously dispensed with any company the night before or perhaps he’d spent the night at her place and made an early departure. She answered, trying to sound breezy and cheerful. “Hey Jug, I’ve found something weird.”

“What? A decent burger in England? An unrepressed straight British guy? Hey, have you been ghosting me?” he joked, carrying his laptop from desk to couch and flopping onto the cushions next to Toffee who looked right at home and immediately climbed onto his lap.

“No. Listen, Eliza’s fiancé paid for a scholar called Forsythe Pendleton to get a degree from the University of London. He graduated in 1861.”

“Okay, weird. Probably just a coincidence. It was a more common name back then. Hey, I didn’t know she had a fiancé.”

“He died in New York in 1890. Forsythe I mean. The fiancé, Peregrine, drowned in a lake.”

“Oh, shit. It’s like Dickens, all death and ridiculous names. Well, New York makes it more intriguing I guess. Maybe there’s a connection after all. That’d be freaky wouldn’t it? You want me to look into it, find out about him? I could Ellis Island the shit out of it.”

“Would you? That’d be great. If you’ve got time. I’ll text you what I found already.” She swallowed. “Hey, so… new girlfriend?”

“Ah well. Labels. She’s nice but I’m not a relationship guy, am I?”

“You are if you want to be. You’d be a great boyfriend. Cool and smart and sexy.” She felt the colour rise to her cheeks. Had she said too much?

“Well I’m having that on my gravestone. I’ll call you if I find anything yeah?”

Betty agreed hastily and ended the call, hoping that she hadn’t made things weird between them. She stared at the fire, thinking about Forsythe, plucked from the coal face and sent to the university. How did he adjust to that? She’d felt like a fish out of water in college but to have experienced what he had, to have had no real schooling, to have no family money to support him must have been an isolating experience, she wondered if he had been tortured by not knowing his benefactor like Pip. Perhaps Eliza had been his Estella.

A few days later she woke from a dream of the schoolroom, of the letters FP carved into the chalkboard frame. She felt drawn back to it so she thought she would stop by and open herself up to its experiences once more before dropping the key back at the vicarage and thanking Prudence for the hot water bottle. She walked there through the village, imagining Eliza walking the same route every day of her brief working life, possibly walking it only a few days after her fiancé drowned. Inside the school room she wandered over to the chalkboard and traced the carved initials on the side with her fingertips. Forsythe had been there, leaving a mark, like her Forsythe had carved his place indelibly in her heart and memory. What she couldn’t understand was why Peregrine had funded a scholarship for him and then kept it a secret. She wondered if Forsythe would have had some reason to refuse money from Eliza’s intended. As she stood by the board the light seemed to flicker and dim unnaturally around her and she clutched at a desk, trying to ground herself in the present, to keep from losing herself in Eliza. It worked to a degree. 

_When she looked up the schoolroom was dim and spectral, night skies and a bright moon beyond the windows, an array of guttering candles, two heads bowed low together over a book, one dark and disarranged, one with a golden crown of braids. The woman, hardly more than a girl, spoke some words in what sounded like Greek, he hesitated a moment before translating, “Old loves are dropped when new ones come,” and then chuckling in a mirthless and bitter tone._

_“If you wish to speak of something then do so. Your witless sniggering is of no use for communication,” she snapped._

_“No. Let’s continue. Although I suspect that Medea is of less value to me that an extra hour of sleep before the pit whistle blows again.”_

_“And if you are able to gain the scholarship what will profit you more? Your Greek is poor Jock. It will suffice for a collier but not for a university man. Now you read.”_

_He spoke in stuttering Greek and Betty squeezed her eyes shut._

When she opened them again all was as it had been before, the schoolroom empty and desolate. But she had seen them, Eliza and Jock, her first pupil, the miner scholar. Just like her own Forsythe he eschewed his given name, to Eliza he was Jock. She was hard on him but without that could he have dreamed of a degree, employment other than the dark pit? He had seemed jealous though. Perhaps the student had developed a hopeless crush on his philanthropic teacher. Eliza had been trying to help her old friend escape from his fate by sharing with him all that a woman could legally own in those days, her learning. Had he wanted more from her than that?

She locked the school and wandered to the vicarage, deep in thought. Geoffrey and Prudence insisted that she stay for dinner and served her a bizarre dish that they called toad in the hole. To her great relief it transpired that no toads had been harmed in its preparation. She asked them about the coal mining history of the area and Geoffrey produced a pamphlet on the subject written by one of his parishioners that included photographs of the miner’s cottages and of men with hollow eyes and dirty faces emerging from some kind of metal cage, their eyes all half closed against the bright daylight. She recognised the cottages from her walks and wondered if Jock had lived there. Prudence asked how she was enjoying her own cottage and she said that the hot water bottle helped. “It’s bleak now but it’ll be lovely up there in the spring. All that may blossom,” Prudence observed. 

Betty raised an eyebrow questioningly, “May blossom?” 

“Yes, the hawthorns up there, all round the cottage. By the middle of May you’ll think there’s a blizzard with all the flowers. I walk up there with the dogs all the time then. But remember it’s bad luck to bring it in the house.”

“Prudence,” Geoffrey remonstrated. “Old wives’ tales and superstition. What will Betty think of us.”

“I didn’t realise they were hawthorns. I thought they were dead. Why is it unlucky?” Betty asked, curious about the local folklore. “Isn't the blossom was supposed to be all fertility rites and may queens and ‘here we go gathering knots of may.’”

“Ah you’ve been reading your Hardy. It’s not unlucky outdoors but the superstitious,” here he looked meaningfully at his wife, “don’t bring it inside. Some people say it’s because the flowers start to smell of decaying flesh after they’ve been picked and it reminded people of the plague. Or it was associated with the Virgin Mary so if you gathered it you’d be suspected of being a papist when that was a good way to get burned at the stake.”

Here Prudence interrupted with a mischievous grin, “Or maybe it’s because all that May Day licentiousness needs to be kept out in the fields, not inside respectable homes. And it has associations with magic and fairyland too. Was Thomas the Rhymer on your curriculum?”

He hadn’t been so Geoffrey explained that there was a thirteenth century ballad about Thomas who, falling asleep under a hawthorn, was transported to Elf-land where he received the gift of prophecy from Queen Mab herself. “Some people think Thomas was transported to the future which was how he could prognosticate,” Geoffrey chuckled. Betty made a note to seek out the poem although her capacity for the uncanny and supernatural was already somewhat overburdened. 

It was a pleasant evening and Geoffrey and Prudence were fun if somewhat eccentric companions. She’d had a good time. Just as she was about to say her goodbyes Prudence beckoned to her and took her to see the watercolour by Eliza that hung in a spare bedroom. When she saw it she had to grab the bed-frame to keep from falling. The painting was a sensitive and romantic study of a young man in a loose white shirt leaning in a doorway, the sun behind him, a dark curl hanging in front of striking blue eyes. He was a dream man, tall, slim, handsome, poetic. He was her dream man, he was Jughead, a little more muscular perhaps but unmistakably her Jughead, the same questioning expression, the same arched brow. She gasped and sat on the bed as she struggled to catch her breath. Prudence was alarmed, calling down to Geoffrey to fetch a glass of water. “It’s just, he looks like someone I know. It was a shock. Here, look, do you see it too?” Betty mumbled, grabbing her phone and showing Prudence her lock screen, Betts and Juggie, arms around each other at the bar, her wearing the blue hat he’d given her.

“Oh, goodness, yes. He’s very like isn’t he? I can see why it surprised you. He’s your young man?”

“He’s my dearest friend,” Betty said, trying not to let the sadness at the correction show.

The experience had shaken her badly so Geoffrey insisted on driving her home. As she got out of the car he leaned across to speak to her through the open car window. “We’re worried about you Elizabeth. So pale and haunted looking. If you need to talk, spiritual or temporal, you know where we are. Please. That’s what vicars and vicar’s spouses are for.” She smiled and assured him that she’d bear it in mind, a wry smile on her lips at the accuracy of “temporal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jock is able to attend University College London. For hundreds of years the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge were really only for the education of clergy. If you were not of the Church of England you could not be admitted. No Catholics, no dissenters, no women or Jews obviously. UCL was established in the first half of the nineteenth century by a committee including the philosopher Jeremy Bentham who still resides in the lobby in a wooden case...mummified. The mission was a radical modern curriculum and the admittance of men of any faith or background.
> 
> A word about May Day. May Day has its origins in Beltane, an ancient celebration rooted in the agricultural calendar. It’s the time to put livestock out to graze, to celebrate the start of the summer. The celebrations were surpressed by the Puritans after the English Civil war in the 1600s but, in the Victorian era, Romanticism inspired a great interest in folklore and ancient rites and old traditions were revived or sometimes just invented. There’s a song, “Here we go gathering nuts in May,” but there are no nuts in May. It should be “here we go gathering knots of may,” referring to gathering knots or branches of may blossom, the white flowers of the hawthorn. The may blossom is supposed to be out on May Day although there’s a problem because of some Julian Calendar/Gregorian calendar switching that puts the schedule out a bit.
> 
> Celebrations involved “bringing in the May/may” by flowers, weaving floral garlands, crowning a May king and queen and having a big procession led by jack o the Green who was a dude dressed in green as an echo of the old tree worship business. Then there would be dancing around an obviously phallic, decorated Maypole as a kind of fertility rite. The idea was that the drinking and the dancing would encourage young people to pair up on May Day, try each other out a little and then get married six weeks later, on Midsummer Day, the original June Weddings. It became associated with a kind of wild licentiousness and outdoor sex😉.


	4. The Pain Begins to Travel, Dancing as it Goes

_Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,_  
_Saying that now you are not as you were_  
_When you had changed from the one who was all to me,_  
_But as at first, when our day was fair._

 _Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,_  
_Standing as when I drew near to the town_  
_Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,_  
_Even to the original air-blue gown!_

From _The Voice_ by Thomas Hardy 

She’d built enough trust with Sandra at the university to finally be permitted to remove some of the more robust documents to work on at the cottage. She suspected the decision said more about the value attributed to the papers of a “teacher and minor essayist” than to her impeccable academic credentials but she’d take the win. She had been reading and rereading Eliza’s essays, wondering about her ancestor’s moods and her passions. She wanted to try to match the published work to the material in her correspondence. There was something elegiac and longing in her writing, a sense of something missing or lost. She related to it, thought it was connected to her fear that she had missed her opportunity with Jughead. When she got home he’d probably be shacked up with the mystery girl and she’d have to pine pathetically for him. When she thought about it she wondered if they had been making a habit of missing each other.

Four years before, when they’d both been starting their grad school careers, her trying to be Toni Morrison at Cornell and him channeling John Irving and Flannery O’Connor at the Writer’s Workshop, he’d called her up to ask what her plans were for New Year, said he was going crazy in the midwest, hinted for an invitation. She’d obliged, eager to see him. She told him she’d been feeling lonely in the big city. He’d come in on a Greyhound which at the time she’d thought was an affectation, his attempt at a Midnight Cowboy aesthetic. Now she wondered if it had been the only way he could afford the trip. She’d taken him to a party at the home of a professor of phonetics, a gorgeous brownstone up on West 84th. She’d introduced him around and he’d been talking to boring Edwina about her theory that all world myths had a common origin, when the guy she’d had her eye on since the start of the year, Simon, made his move. She’d sidled over, slipped Jug her key and told him not to wait up. He’d assured her he could find his way back to her place, seemed distracted and a little judgemental, but then he’d actually met her on the doorstep the next morning, coming from the subway looking sheepish, with an angry looking hickey on his throat. And she’d been giggling and giddy, hand in hand with Simon. Jug had packed up that ratty old kit bag, said he’d been planning a side trip to see Archie upstate and was gone before brunch. He’d been in the city less than a day. Had she fundamentally misunderstood the point of that visit or was she projecting? She burned with shame to think that she’d failed him.

When she wasn’t reading and making notes she hiked for miles, actually beginning to enjoy it now that Prudence had supplied her with a pair of gaiters to keep the mud from seeping in at her boot tops. As she walked the lanes violets peeked shyly from the shadows and a chorus of unfamiliar birdsong assured her that spring was on its way. On the hilltops the frosts lingered late, crunching beneath her boots, riming the tarns where the peaks shadowed the mysterious inky depths. The bracken was rusty red against skies so blue and flat that they seemed to have been painted, birches standing like white bones on the fells. She could rest on a rocky granite outcrop and look down at the county spread below her like a relief map, tiny cars dawdling silently along roads like bugs tracing the veins in a leaf, sailing boats gliding from shore to shore on Derwent Water. Sometimes she scared herself by clambering along an exposed ridge of rock, hundreds of feet to fall on either side, using her hands on the cold, wet rocks to steady herself, heart thumping, wind whipping her hair. She could see why Eliza had wanted to write about this place; it was glorious.

One dreich afternoon when rain kept her from exploring the higher peaks, she strolled through the village and out to the cottages she had seen in the photographs of the miners. These days they had solar panels on the roofs and boxy glass-walled kitchen extensions but the bone structure of the old dwellings could be discerned under the cosmetic surgery. As she walked she thought she heard a man’s voice call out and she turned 

_to see a paved area outside the cottages that hadn’t been at the end of the row a moment ago. The rain was gone and the light was soft and golden, a summer evening as the shadows lengthened. A tall, dark haired man stood by a pump that was set at the centre of the flagstones. He was calling to a red headed girl who sat on a low wall, giggling with her girlfriends, her skirts hitched to her knees, enjoying the sun on her skin. He called out again, “Jessie, willst tha gie us a hand lassie?” His accent combined the flat Cumbrian vowels that she heard everywhere with a Scots burr. Jock. His skin was black with coal dust, only that around those intense eyes remained pale. He pulled off his singlet as he stood by the pump handle and the girl bundled her skirts as she stood to run over to him._

_She dashed forward along the path, her heavy skirts and petticoats hampering her movement, “Jessie, don’t trouble yourself. I can help. Sit girl. You are not needed,” she ordered, the school mistress evident in her tone. Jessie went back to her seat with a tight, disappointed expression and Jock turned to her in surprise. He was dirty, there was blood on his shoulder, in his eyes there was exhaustion and sadness. She could hardly breathe for how much she loved him._

_“I would never ask you to…” he said in a modulated, almost unaccented voice, the schoolroom voice._

_“And you did not ask. I did. Please allow me to be useful to you.” She reached out for the pump handle and, after a long moment, he put his head under the water and ran his fingers through his hair, the water blackened as the dust washed out. He used his hands to cup the water and rub the dirt from his chest and shoulders, the cold making his flesh break out in goosebumps. She wanted to wash him, wanted him to stand before a warm fire while she used a sponge and hot water and her own perfumed soap to clean his beautiful, scarred body. She would worship him as she did it and she would follow the sponge with trails of soft kisses, dry his skin with her hair, anoint him with oils._

_“Miss Furnivall? Eliza? You can stop now. I have finished,” he said, looking at her in embarrassment as he pulled a cleaner singlet over his wet torso. “Why are you here? I would have thought you would be arranging your trousseau.”_

_“Jock, I wish you had not seen that. I wanted to tell you privately. It was only that moment decided. Peregrine came to the schoolroom to ask me just this afternoon. And then you were there and I didn’t know how to explain before he told you.”_

_“There was a collapse at the pit. They sent us away. The shaft is too narrow for more than a couple of men to recover the corpses. I thought I could work on Medea. But I’ll give it up now. You won’t be teaching once you are a married woman. I should congratulate you. It is a good match for you. You have done well.”_

_She looked at him and saw the hurt and disappointment in his eyes and she wanted nothing more than to make it go away. She had no idea how to achieve that. “Will you walk with me for a moment? Let me speak with you.” He shrugged and followed her away from the cottages, towards the fells. She took a deep breath, wondering how far she could betray Peregrine’s trust. “It is not a match at all Jock for I don’t love him and he cannot love me. He is my friend and he will be my husband in name alone.” He paused and looked into her eyes, trying to see if she was telling him the truth. “What would you have me do instead? Should I remain the village schoolmistress? What will I do when my father dies and the rectory is taken by the new vicar and I am put out of my home? Should I throw myself upon my brother's charity?” He exhaled as if he had been holding his breath and she reached out a hand and laid it on his arm. Her heart raced at the contact and she felt breathless. She cleared her throat and found herself coughing, turning away to pull her handkerchief from her sleeve. He looked concerned. “It’s nothing, the chalk dust,” she waved away his worry. “I am sorry that you were hurt when Peregrine told you that I had accepted his proposal. I will speak frankly Jock, if you wish it I will ask to be released from my promise. But, my dear friend, what good can it do us? I can do much for the village, for the county as Viscountess Morpeth, one day as a baroness. What can I do as a spinster? What is my other choice? His father has agreed there will be a long engagement, two years if I wish. He will employ a schoolmaster to take my place after the wedding.” She looked into his troubled eyes, watched his brow draw tight as he considered. She wanted him to know her heart. “If I cannot have the man whom I would choose then I must make the best of those left to me or remain unwed. I do not know how I should speak of this with any modesty.” She looked about herself in frustration and then inspiration struck. “Fair Jessie, does she have a suitor?”_

_“No, there is little money for wives or bairns these days,” he replied, wondering at the turn of the conversation as she led him into a stand of windblown hawthorn, the flowers’ scent heady and fleshy._

_“Suppose Jessie loved a man and he loved her but they could not afford to marry, suppose he could barely keep himself. Then what if a wealthier man took a fancy to pretty Jessie and asked her to wed. She would refuse him, because she loves another. What would her true love say then?” she asked, eyes downcast._

_“He would tell her to marry, to be happy, to forget him and be a good wife. But he would be disconsolate while he said it and devoutly wish the world would turn upside down that he might be the man of means and make her his own.” His eyes flashed with passionate intensity as he spoke._

_“And she would turn the world if only she could. And she would long to be his. If he asked it she would run to her home and snatch up her chemise and her books and bring them to his rooms. She would be happy to be wed without ceremony at the church door,” Eliza looked at her boots, splattered with mud where she had run along the track after him and spoke more quietly, “She would dispense with clergy entirely and let him take her out to the fells on the warm summer eve and be his completely if he asked it.” Now she met his eye, cheeks blazing. “But what would become of them then? He would never be able to better himself with a wife and children to support. She would be obliged to give up her employment. Would they be happy? Would Jessie be glad as he set off for the pit each day, knowing the whistle might sound for a collapse and he may never come back, that he could have had a different, better, safer life? Would he still be joyful when her family turned from her and would not know her?”_

_He listened, growing paler and more tense with every word and now he bellowed as he turned and struck the trunk of one of the trees with his fist, blood on his knuckles, tears in his eyes. She was in his arms in a second, holding him, reaching up to stroke back his hair, pulling him further into the shadow of the trees, tipping back her head and looking into his eyes. He kissed her then, both of them knowing that this was the only time, that this moment and only this one was theirs. When it ended all would be as it was before, she would be Miss Furnivall and he would be the collier scholar who read Medea in the schoolroom in the evening and all would be polite and cordial. She knew that, saw her future stretch ahead in chaste philanthropy and she kissed him deeper. He bent over her, a dark spirit in the hawthorn wood, making her gasp and moan, his lips so intoxicating that she found her fingers under his singlet, caressing the flesh she had wanted to touch as he washed and his hand was at her throat and she wanted so badly to lift her skirts, to sink to the ground, to be possessed and overcome entirely. He took her dress in his fist, twisting the fabric and then he was spinning from her, striding away down the path out to the fells with a howl of rage and frustration. She knew that she must not follow no matter that her blood drew her to him with its pounding rush in her ears._

Betty looked around to find herself standing in the middle of one of the new streets in the village. Television sets flickered in new homes, sodium streetlights casting an orange glow, a solitary cat slinking along a fence. She turned to see the street sign, “The Hawthorns,” shook herself and headed back to the cottage as the rain fell in huge, drenching drops.

That night she tried to comprehend the experience. She had been kissed by a ghost but the feeling had been anything but spectral. She had been well aware of his materiality as he pressed against her. She’d felt Eliza’s eager, uncomplicated response to Jock but at the same time she’d been there too, a passenger in the experience. For her it had been like kissing Jughead and she had given herself over to it. She felt less ambiguous about the unearthly encounter than about the last time she’d had sex with Simon.

Eliza and Forsythe were constantly in her mind every day now. She realised she was trying to figure out a way for them to be together when the harsh fact was that it was much too late for them, they had been doomed by time and class and sickness. She wondered if, after Peregrine’s tragic death, Jock had come to her. He had turned the world, they had done it together with long hours of study and ambition and determination. Perhaps he had fallen in love with someone else, regretted his early infatuation. Perhaps he had become tired of waiting for her to be free and moved the hell on with his life. She wondered with a hard, sad laugh if she was thinking of Eliza’s Forsythe or her own. 

What she'd begun to call the 'slips' happened more and more frequently, especially out there on the fells. She had become blasé about it now. Her foot would lift from a frosty hilltop in the diffused pink light of a misty sunrise to be set down on a balmy, scented summer evening or to sink shockingly into thick snow. She followed paths from May Cottage that didn’t exist on her next excursion. She looked at her hand to find that she was carrying a cloth wrapped around a hunk of hard bread and a rind of cheese and sat on dry bracken to tear crumbs from the meagre meal. Once she found an unfamiliar song on her lips “Fair and lovely as thou art You hae stown my very heart, I can die, but canna part My bonnie dearie,” and knew who had taught it to her. The absence was unspeakable but she no longer knew what part of the pain was Eliza’s and what was her own.

Betty had been on one of those personal effectiveness courses in grad school. It had promised to analyse her strengths and weaknesses and transform her into an economically viable cog in the capitalist machine. She’d hated it and swerved into a commercially worthless expertise on Lady Audley’s Secret. The take home from the course had been one of the facilitators saying that we stop seeing things that are the same everyday. If the wallpaper’s peeling, if your hairstyle is out of date, if there’s a button off your coat, you simply don’t notice after a while. It becomes the unobserved backdrop to the people and passions that come and go. She’d always had him in addition to the boyfriends or hobbies or friendships that had been occupying her at any given moment. To see the overlooked things you have to look away. Then, when you turn back, they’re obvious. That’s when you fix the button or leave your husband or get a new apartment. This trip had given her the space to consider her life and see Jughead’s constant, necessary, unheeded presence. And now she missed him, missed him in a different way to missing Veronica or her own bed or a decent vanilla latte, different to missing the things that added value to an already good life. She missed him like there was a hole in her chest that the wind from the fells blew through, whistling and tearing at the tattered edges. It was bracing and painful, exhilarating and exposing, a revealing agony. He was like breathing. Disregarded until there’s no air and then, with that absence comes fear and pain. It was only now that she realised she could lose him, always be this hollow thing with a void where her lungs should be, gasping, suffocating. It would end her. This is the way the world ends, she thought, not with a bang but a whimper.

Then one morning the postman knocked and delivered a package from the States. She tore it open to find a letter from Jug.

> Dear Betty,  
>  I hope this is what you needed. The theatre archives were full of kids who’ll break into song without provocation, trying to ‘put on the show right here’ so I really don’t want to go back there. I thought I’d better send hard copies since scans are always useless. There’s actually quite a lot of material on him. He wrote for the stage and had a couple of minor hits. There were some reviews he wrote too, novels and poetry. I got his death certificate. He died in a tuberculosis sanatorium up in the Adirondacks. I thought that was a spooky coincidence until I found out how many folks died from it, like literally a third of working people! Anyway he left everything to his nephew who was called Forsythe after him so that’s where the curse might have begun. I keep telling myself that there can’t be a connection but the name does seems to say different. I’m going to try to trace the nephew. I’ll let you know what I find.
> 
> Also I just wanted to ask if we’re okay Betts? You keep rejecting my calls. Things seemed weird before you left. I know you were upset about Simon so maybe I’m just being an oversensitive idiot. You know that I love you, right? All I care about is that you’re happy so if he made you happy, great; if he doesn’t, I’m glad you’re free. Anyway this mushiness is making me feel vomitous so I’ll drop it but I’m on your side Betts. Always— you know that, right?  
>  Stay safe. Toffee says she misses you.  
>  J

With his note she found a pile of photocopied reviews and playbills as well as a copy of a death certificate. He’d been busy. She ran her fingers over his slanted, spiky handwriting, imagining his hand moving swiftly over the paper and her fingers hovered over his name on her phone screen, wanting to hear his voice and yet fearing that he would be polite and distracted, resenting that he had already wasted so much of his valuable time on her project. She brought her best critical eye to his note, interrogating the words that the author had chosen from all of those in his not inconsiderable arsenal. “Love” was so irritatingly unspecific. If only they’d been ancient Greeks she’d have been able to tell if he meant eros, the romance and sex that she had finally to admit she longed for, or philia, the friendship that she relied upon. “Mushiness,” was interesting. She could just call him and ask him flat out but what would she say? “Jug, did you say mushiness because you’d like to go to bed with me but you don't want to admit it or did you just mean it like when you consistently refuse to hug Archie when he’s feeling sentimental?” Or she could just text him, “Sex? With me?” A low moment was when she found herself making a pros and cons table in her notebook under a neatly ruled heading that read “Tell Jug?” In the pros column there was the freight train orgasm and the way her knees had felt like jelly for two days after the encounter between Eliza and Jock among the hawthorns. Then there was the fearful admission "ILH.” On the cons side she’d written the thing that stopped her in her tracks, “What if he says no?” She wanted the kind of love that Eliza had felt for Jock but she wouldn’t trade their friendship for it and she thought it very possible that if she said too much she might end up with neither a lover nor a friend. In the end she made a quick, businesslike call to thank him for sending the pages and assure him that they were fine. “Just busy and a bit sad, break up stuff, you know how it is.” She deliberately didn't ask about whatshername, Anita or Aliyah or whatever but as she was about to ring off she heard a woman in the background say “Food’s here.” Her heart sank like a stone.

“Hey, sorry, I have to go eat,” he said, a little distracted. “Be good Betts,” and he rang off.

She read the reviews and noted the titles of Forsythe’s plays from the playbills, hoping to find glimpses of his essence. His writing was clear and direct, he expressed his critical judgements forcefully but they mainly referred to obscure novels that she had never read. She wondered if he had been happy, if the sacrifice had been worth it. She didn’t get the sense of who he was from his reviews of other people’s writing but she’d heard him a little in his letter to his benefactor, stilted and formal though it was. Jughead was his fully realised self in his books. In his stories she could see his passions and obsessions, the emotional vulnerability that he protected with sardonic glances and sarcastic remarks in everyday life. She decided to investigate Forsythe through his plays, pushing aside the suspicion that she had missed the point entirely in Jughead’s work, too close to the canvas to see the whole picture.

She made contact with a doctoral researcher in Durham who was working on Victorian theatre and asked if he’d heard of Forsythe Pendleton and was rewarded a couple of days later with the scanned text of a play that he’d written that had been performed in 1861 at the Lyceum in London shortly after he’d graduated as well as an invitation to go to dinner which she politely refused. Jock had scored a palpable hit with his play in the admittedly rather impoverished milieu of mid century Victorian theatre. The play was of its time, a little melodrama with the scope for dramatic stage effects so beloved of the audiences back then. Betty found herself more affected by it than she would have been if she had not known the author’s biography. A poor artist fell in love with a beautiful young flower girl but couldn’t afford to marry. He went to seek the patronage of a rich benefactor but while he was away she caught the eye of a government minister who offered her his “protection.” The virtuous woman refused but the proposition had been overheard by a supposed friend of the artist who wrote to him to warn him that he had been supplanted. He did not return from his patron’s castle and the poor florist froze to death, waiting for him at their prearranged rendezvous by the river. 

The play had clearly tapped into the zeitgeist because it generated good houses for several weeks in the summer of ’61. He’d been doing well for himself that year, she realised, as Eliza had been coming to terms with the loss of her fiancé, her spinsterhood and the onset of her final illness. Their fortunes always seemed at odds, one rising as the other fell. Missing each other always. She leafed through the archive document box, wondering if he had written to his lost love from college or if he had moved away and tried to forget her. It didn’t take long for her to find a pile of letters. The ribbon was blue. It made her think of Jug’s eyes.

> _Dear Miss Furnivall,_
> 
> _I do not intend to overstep the bounds of propriety by writing to you in this way. I know that we cannot be to each other as we were and I beg you not to feel obliged to reply to my scribblings if your intended has any objection or if it would be a tedious duty. I assure you that I will not write again if my epistles are unwelcome but the thought occurred to me that you might care to hear about the life of a scholar in the metropolis._
> 
> _I arrived in the foggy groves of academe and was installed in considerable comfort in a rooming house near the vast new temple to modernity that is King’s Cross Railway Station. Late and early I hear the rumble of locomotives arriving and departing for the North Country. I wonder that anyone should feel the need to be in motion in the night. The soot flies in whenever I dare open the catchment. Coal, it seems, is drawn to me._
> 
> _I share my lodgings with an interesting, pale young man who rejoices in the name of Abstinence Barebone. He is, as you can tell from the name, a Quaker, and consequently ours is an abstemious household. I like him despite his somewhat strident and clamorous extemporaneous prayers. I could have done much worse for a companion. My lectures are of great interest and the professors are men of considerable talents. I have heard that there are extramural lectures which may be attended by ladies! Imagine Eliza if you were able, one day, to visit the metropolis. You might attend such lectures although I imagine you would be able to set the professors aright on their misconstruals and misapprehensions._
> 
> _My earliest memory of you was as a teacher. Do you recall our first meeting? My father and I were newly arrived from Scotland and he was attempting, without success, to make griddle cakes. You had come with your father and your basket of victuals, to deliver alms to the new parishioners and found the rough miner and a shy and motherless boy. I believe I was eight years old and you were, as I think, seven and yet you set to showing my father how to ensure the griddle was hot by waiting until a drop of water would skitter across the surface. I thought you the cleanest, cleverest person in the world. My opinion is entirely unaltered._
> 
> _I hope that you are quite recovered from the cough that lately troubled you and that your family remain well. I would ask to be remembered to them were I not quite certain that my remembrances would be most unwelcome. I think of you Eliza, as the locomotives steam north, as I listen to Abstinence make his zealous prayers, as I lay down to sleep and extinguish the candle. I think of you._
> 
> _Your obedient servant and friend_  
>  _Jock_

The letter made her weep. She longed for just such a letter from her Forsythe rather than the bantering affection of the letter he had sent. If he wrote to her like that she would grab her bag and head straight for the airport. To be thought of by him was all she wanted now. If she was going to break down every time she read a piece of correspondence this thesis was going to be draining in every sense of the word.

She urgently needed a distraction so she called Lucy at the manor and invited herself to dinner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dreich is a Scottish dialect word meaning dreary and dismal used esp. of weather. You do occasionally hear it in Cumbria so perhaps that's where Betty has picked it up...


	5. Until the Hills are Flattened

_A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this._

From _A Tale of Two Cities_ by Charles Dickens

She arrived at the manor twenty minutes early and, already embarrassed to be imposing upon her hosts, she parked at the end of the drive and walked the half mile to the house, using her phone to snap some pictures of the grounds, imagining Eliza walking here. Betty didn’t understand the relationship between the school mistress and the Viscount. Had he really known she was in love with another man? As she walked she became aware of some impediment dragging at her legs and looking down she

_pulled her long skirts clear of a bramble bush impatiently. She sighed, no longer alarmed by the experience but feeling her powerlessness in the face of the perturbing temporal disturbance. The lake lay before her and there in the glittering water she saw a young man swimming. He rolled and tumbled like a salmon, sleek and slippery in the water. She closed her eyes when she recognised the brown hair and broad shoulders. She very much did not want to see Peregrine drown. Then she heard laughing and shouting and glanced back to see there were actually two young men in the water. They wrestled like otters, pulling each other under the water to emerge, shaking quicksilver drops from their hair and diving back to play again. She was a little shocked to see that they were naked but this was his own lake after all. She was the intruder. As she watched, one of the men took the other in his arms and kissed him deeply and passionately, a lover’s kiss. She felt her cheeks redden in embarrassment at observing them in such an intimate, loving, private moment and turned away from the lake, striding between the trees that lined the driveway._

As she walked she realised that the long skirt was gone and she was more practically dressed in the jeans and sweater that she’d put on at the cottage. She suspected that she had just encountered the mysterious Arthur who Peregrine intended to bring on his honeymoon. As the manor came into view she remembered that Lucy had suspected that an artist with that name had painted Peregrine’s likeness. An original Arthur Hatcham, stored away in a barn until Lucy with her art history degree had happened upon it. At last she felt that she could piece together Eliza’s tale. She had felt Eliza's embarrassment at what she had seen but she had not been shocked or angry. "He cannot love me," she'd told Jock. Now Betty knew why. She seemed to have been a very resourceful young woman. Betty imagined that a lot of Victorian maidens would have responded with less ingenuity to the problem of having fallen irrevocably in love with a collier. She had known perfectly well that Jock would never allow her to be reduced to penury for him and she couldn’t tolerate his condemnation to the purgatory of the mines. Eliza had simply rolled up her sleeves and proceeded to make the best of things, accepting a man who would be a friend to her but otherwise leave her to her philanthropy and her books and who could, with the right prompting, allow Jock to clamber up from the pit. She had understood that love was love even when it acted for the other's good in silence. Peregrine was heir to a great estate. It would not be tolerated that he should remain unmarried. Theirs was an elegant solution given their times and yet she had felt how Eliza’s heart had ached to see Peregrine loved and in love and to know that fate would not offer her that joy. She could almost hear Eliza chiding her for not grasping her own opportunity while she had still had the chance.

Dinner at Lucy and Stu’s was rather different to her experience at the vicarage. “Come in Betty, I’m afraid it’s just a kitchen supper. I hope that’s okay,” Lucy had trilled as she opened the door. “Let’s drink simply gallons of wine and then we’ll find you a dry nest without too many mice and you can stay here overnight. Say yes!”

Betty was glad of the excuse to shake off the worries that had plagued her so she grinned and accepted a huge glass of merlot and drank freely. Stu had made a spicy and fragrant stew of vegetables which they ate from a tagine along with flat breads and olives while they chatted about the slow progress of the renovations. She asked Lucy to tell her about the artist that she had mentioned and her hostess gave her the benefit of her extensive education. “Hatcham is kind of important. He died young so he was overlooked for years but there’s been a reevaluation and he’s sort of a rock star now. The value always goes up when there aren’t many paintings. A lot of people say he had a big influence on Whistler’s mature style.”

“What happened to him?” asked Betty.

“His family objected to him becoming an artist so he trained as a doctor. He was working in Carlisle and contracted cholera in an outbreak there in 1860. Summer time in Victorian cities could be pretty deadly. He was only 25. He’s buried in St Cuthbert’s in the city.”

So Arthur died in 1860 and Percival died that same summer. It seemed a macabre coincidence. Betty made a note of the church in her phone. She’d stop by when she was next visiting the archive in Carlisle.

Lucy and Stu wanted to know about her life in New York and, as she talked about her friends, she let slip that her closest pal was Forsythe Jones at which point Stu lost his mind. “I’ve read everything that he’s written. Wow, that’s amazing. Oh my God, you’re Betty!”

“Guilty,’” she laughed. 

“Betty, as in “I wrote this for you, Betty,” as in “The Greatest Punishment? I’ve just finished it. It’s so great.”

She smiled, “Yeah the Spanish civil war story. That’s me. It was sweet of him. I’d read a couple of drafts so…”

“It’s Lorca right?” Betty shook her head, not getting the reference. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it is. I did Spanish at university. “El mayor castigo.’”

“He actually just got that as a tattoo. I didn't realise it was a quotation,” Betty laughed.

“Yeah, it's Garcia Lorca from Blood Wedding, umm, something like ‘to burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.’” Betty felt the room spin. Had she missed it again? Had he been trying to tell her all the time? And now just as she got the message and was free, he was sexing Abigail or Alison or whatever the hell she was called. She embraced Lucy’s suggestions about gallons of wine and simply allowed the evening to sweep her away. 

She woke up in an unfamiliar room with a headache, a mouth that felt like the bottom of the old range at the cottage and a vague memory of dancing with Lucy on the lawn in the moonlight, screaming along to Ben Folds of all things. She had a terrible feeling she may have given too much away. Outside the window a persistent grey drizzle hung in the air and she laughed bitterly at the pathetic fallacy. No lightning storm to sunder her from her hopes, just a melancholy saturating precipitation, slowly dissolving any optimism she had left. She refused Stu’s offer of a cooked breakfast on the grounds that she was too hungover to do anything but go home and think well on her sins and he laughed and waved her off. Lucy called out from an upstairs window as she trudged down the drive in the mist, “Call him up and tell him Betty. It's never too late.” Clearly she had said far more than she should have.

Back at the cottage she drank water and took a couple of Tylenol, wishing she still had the Xanax, and crawled under the blankets. Sometime late in the afternoon she laid a fire in the bedroom fireplace, filled the hot water bottle and brought Jock’s letters up to her bed from the archive box. She checked her emails on her phone and hyperventilated a little when she saw that one was from Jug but her girlish excitement calmed when she read it.

> bcooper581@cornell.edu.  
>  Subject: Weird shit  
>  From: etinarcadia@thunderbird.net
> 
> Betts  
>  Ok, weirdest fucking thing. The nephew is my great great grandfather. For real. He went to Chicago with his uncle’s money in 1892 for the World’s Fair and ended up making it big in breakfast cereal. His daughter married a guy (the Jones in the mix) in the company her pop started but then they lost everything in the great depression. My grandfather was born after they fell from grace and the rest is trailer park history. So my three times great uncle knew/ was friends with/? your five times great aunt. Like what are the goddamn odds? I’m freaking out, like metaphysically. Anyway we’re going to Saranac Lake tomorrow to see old Forsythe’s grave. And there’s a second cousin or something who I’ve emailed who is supposed to have all his papers. Also am I meant to be brushing this cat? Call me when you get a sec.  
>  Love you  
>  Jug  
>  PS Miss you

She wasn’t surprised. The family resemblance had been enough to assure her of the connection. She felt herself beginning to go back down the rabbit hole of literary analysis of every word he used and that way madness lay. “We,” was the elephant in the room. He was taking Annie or Ada. She couldn’t possibly call him no matter what Lucy said, no matter what he said. She was too much of a mess to deal with any of that.

She reached for Forsythe’s letters and picked one at random in a careless and desultory manner. The writing was spiky and rather haphazard.

> _My most dear Eliza,_
> 
> _I have just this moment received the news. There was a notice in The Times. I am so sorry that this most grievous blow has befallen you. I know that Morpeth and I had our disagreements but I think he meant well despite the disadvantage to his character of being born into wealth and high rank. I grieve for him. It is, however, for you that my heart breaks. You were to be wed next week were you not? My dearest friend, I wish that I had words of comfort but I fear that none will suffice._
> 
> _I know that you once said that yours was not a love match but I refuse to believe that he could know you and not come to love you. Such a thing is impossible. Your manifold graces and excellences will have made you most dear to him I am certain. I am glad that he had the great joy of your affection albeit for too brief a span. What can I write under such circumstances when you know all too well my innermost sympathies and desires?_
> 
> _You may be assured that now, both in this world and in the next, there is one being for whom your happiness and wellbeing is the most urgent and constant concern. We shall both guard you, both stand ready to serve you, both pray for you. To say more would be quite wrong but Eliza, nothing has changed, nothing ever shall._
> 
> _Your friend,_  
>  _Jock_

Folded into that letter was another page in a different, more feminine hand.  
It had been crumpled and then flattened.

>   
>  _Dearest Jock,_
> 
> _Your letter was such a comfort to me. Things had not altered between Peregrine and myself. When I told you that he could not love me I did not dissemble. His heart belonged to another and, sadly, that other was taken to a heavenly reward just three days before Peregrine made his own dark journey. l shall not speak of what I fear with regard to his accident but I think you must know what is in my mind. I wish that they could lay at rest together but that cannot be. Peregrine was loved, better than many. It was his great misfortune that not all love is deemed a blessing by those who fix our values. I think that you and I know something of that injustice._
> 
> _I shall be brief and I shall be bold, my love. I am free, not by my wish but by fate’s hand. You will soon have turned your world, you will be a man of respectable means. I have some small savings. Come for me when you have your degree and I am yours. If my father objects we can go to Gretna or take ship for America, we can go wherever you please. Come for me and_

She had written no more but there was a stain on the page. Betty wondered if it were an ink blot but when she looked more closely she realised that it was blood. The strange flatness that she had seen in the drawing room at the vicarage now overlaid the cottage and she stared at the letter in her hand…

_which was not her hand, these fingers were stained with ink. There was a burning, crushing pain in her chest and when she lay her hand over her heart she could feel the stays of her corset and the rustle of the brown taffeta dress, as well as the fluttering of her heart. She stared in horror at the fresh wet blood on the page. She knew perfectly well what it meant, for it meant death. She put down the paper, wracked by a new spasm of coughing, unable to catch her breath. When it had passed she read the words she had just written and sobbed, knowing that if he came for her now it would not be to gain a wife and helpmate but to bind himself to a patient, to a burden, who would wither and die before his eyes. She wept then because she knew what she must do. She must stay silent. He must think that she grieved for her true love and never come back to her. He would marry. He would have the good life that it lay outside her power to share. She had nothing to offer him except sickness and grief and she would not give him those dreadful twins. She would write a polite and sombre letter to thank him for his condolences as if he were just an acquaintance and not her very soul._

Betty sobbed over the letter. To love so deeply and yet never to have that love fulfilled was indeed the greatest punishment. It could not be borne. She would not bear it. She grabbed a sheet of paper, rummaged in her purse for a pen and began to write.

> _My dearest Jug,_
> 
> _I expect you’ll think that I’m pretty eccentric for writing you a letter instead of calling or texting but I think this is the most appropriate way to tell you the thing that I need you to know. I am so in love with you._
> 
> _You’ve always been the person I trusted with my life. You’re the person whose good opinion I value more than everyone else’s and what’s more, you are the most real person I know. You live Jug. You take risks and you try and if you fail you get right back up and try again. No-one helped you or gave you anything. You have earned your successes and I am so proud of you. You’re also absurdly, unnecessarily sexy._
> 
> _I wonder if what I have written is a surprise to you. Perhaps you’ve always known and have just been waiting for me to catch up. When we dated as kids our love was too big for us. We needed to grow into it. But then, somehow, I lost sight of what I wanted. I didn’t realise what the dedication of Greatest Punishment meant. I wish I had. I think perhaps I did something stupid and careless that New Year’s Eve in New York. If I did please forgive me. It wasn’t my intention. I have been such an idiot._
> 
> _Writing this is so frightening. I’m scared that I’ll lose your friendship and that is the most precious thing to me in the world. Perhaps, if you don’t feel the same or if what you’ve got going with the girl you’re seeing is important to you, you can pretend that this letter went astray like Tess’ note to Angel. I won’t bring it up if you don’t. I’ll know you just want to carry on being friends._

As she considered her next words her phone pinged. She had received a text from Jug with video attachment. She opened it to see him, in leather jacket and jeans, standing next to a gravestone with a “Here it is” gesture. “Pan down. Show her the inscription,” he ordered whoever was holding his phone. It had to be her. Adele, Angela... She was torn, curious about the gravestone, horrified that he had gone there with this random girl when this was their thing. The grave marker read “Forsythe Pendleton 1835-1890 Playwright. _“In our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”_ He ducked into the frame again to say “Aeschylus. It’s from Agammenon. Sounds like he was pretty miserable, even for a guy with TB. I’m weirded out by the name, I feel like Scrooge at his own graveside. I guess I’d better repent or buy a goose or something. Don't want any ghosts rocking up to point out how I'm fucking up my life. Anyway we’re heading off now. Apparently the third cousin in Albany who knows all about this shit is happy to meet up. Speak later.” He looked up and addressed his videographer, “ Ok that’ll do.” The video ended.

Betty snatched up her unfinished letter, crumpled it in her fist, threw it into the fire and watched it burn. 

She knew she was in danger of sinking into a fog of misery and self reproach so over the next few days she tried to emulate her stoical ancestor, working on the thesis, writing a chapter about the Gaskell letters and musing on the insight that it was in the nature of an archive that the subject is always missing. There were the letters Eliza had received, glimpses of her in her correspondents' words but her own contribution was largely absent, those letters destroyed or laying unregarded in other files and boxes in attics and archives elsewhere. Eventually she began to ask herself what she could do to forward her understanding of the events of the summer of 1860 and decided to drive to the church in Carlisle and pay her respects to Arthur. Maybe she would be able to step back in time and escape from the complexities of her own life in the long resolved events of the past. The church was a strange, inelegant rather squat affair with a huge pulpit and galleries supported by columns inside. Disappointingly nothing supernatural occurred so she stepped back outside to enjoy the first warming sunshine of the year. A squirrel scurried across a path and swung up into the trees where crows were shrieking and squabbling. She wondered if Eliza had come here and stood in this churchyard, perhaps had even seen Arthur lowered into the earth here, had held onto Peregrine’s arm to comfort him. Eventually she found the grave. There was a large granite memorial. She copied the inscription into her notebook as she stood by the grave.

To the memory of  
Arthur George Percy Hatcham,  
1835-1860  
artist and physician  
This memorial is dedicated  
on behalf of his dear friend Peregrine of Morpeth  
“all love is sweet,  
Given or returned. Common as light is love,  
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.”

As she stared at the monument she realised that Eliza and Peregrine would never have stood here together. Peregrine would not have lived to see his lover interred. She had said in her unsent letter to Jock that Peregrine outlived his beloved by only three days, which raised the question as to who had ordered such a grand monument for an obscure painter on his behalf. The Shelley quotation implied that it was someone who had known Peregrine and Arthur and their secret, but surely Eliza could not have afforded such a grand edifice on a school teacher’s salary?

As she drove back to the cottage she wondered how Jug’s meeting with his cousin had gone. She was pleased that the project had allowed him to get in touch with his ancestry a little more, aware that he had always felt unrooted, his parents were like tumbleweed, blown this way and that by fate. It would be good for him to know where he came from. As she parked outside May Cottage she noticed that there were green shoots on the hawthorn. It would soon be in blossom. Spring was on its way. In the porch she found a small cardboard box and she smiled at the thought that Prudence had knitted her another hot water bottle cover. When she opened the flaps of the box instead of garish handicrafts she found a notebook. This time the note was from Geoffrey.

> _Dear Elizabeth,  
>  We have some exciting news! I have heard this week that I am to be ordained the next Bishop of Jarrow. While this is a great honour and opportunity Prudence and I have been faced with the necessity of packing up our belongings and removing them from the vicarage in very short order. I was doing valiant battle with the cobwebs in the attic when I came upon a trunk containing this journal. It also contains a wedding dress which I suppose to have been the dress that poor Eliza never had the chance to wear. It is a very affecting sight. The journal will need to go to the archive of your great aunt’s papers in Carlisle but I thought it sensible to entrust that mission to you once you have perused it for your studies._
> 
> _Prudence and I will be having a little drinks party on Friday from seven in the evening. Please do come along. We have something else we would like you to see._
> 
> _Geoffrey_

Betty carried the journal reverently into the cottage, devoured a bowl of cereal, washed her hands and pulled on archivist’s gloves before settling down to transcribe the journal. 

She worked through the night. The journal began in 1857 with the opening of the school and seemed to have begun as a professional log. She recorded the names of her pupils and the monies laid out as well as the donations received. Gradually the tone of he writing changed. She began to record not only that Mr Pendleton had spent two hours working on his German or Mathematics but also personal notes about the parts of the work that had irritated him and those that he had responded to most enthusiastically. “He has a particular aptitude for the most natural and elegant phrasing in translation. He could be a great writer if he had a tenth of the opportunities that richer men squander,” she wrote. She wrote of Peregrine “My dear friend has a great secret and I am honoured to be his confidante. He fears that his father suspects him and plans to marry him off to some local spinster. How will he conceal the truth from her? He is most distraught.” She wrote of Peregrine’s proposal, agonising about whether it would be wrong to marry advantageously in order to rescue Jock from his terrible labour. “I think well on the awful responsibility I undertake. I will stand before God and vow that I will forsake all others and keep myself only unto him, so long as we both shall live. This evening under the shadow of the hawthorn trees I understood the challenge of it. However if I ask it I know Peregrine will endow a scholarship. Jock can turn his world just as we dreamed. We cannot be to each other what I would selfishly wish but at least some good will emerge from the pain, from the strong will come forth sweetness.”

Betty wept when she read of the troubles that had come upon Eliza that summer in 1860. She had been locking the schoolroom when Peregrine had appeared from the fells, his clothing disarranged, his eyes wild, crazed with grief. He handed her the telegram and fell to his knees, wailing, inconsolable. Betty took a moment and calculated Eliza’s age. She was twenty four years old. Betty couldn’t even cope with an unrequited crush and she was a full year older. Eliza had thought that Peregrine would find a way through his grief. She had offered to postpone or cancel the wedding scheduled for three days later and he had stared at her as if he had no idea who was to be married. Then the next day his brother had come to the school to tell her he was dead. 

Eliza became sicker that year, her disease had been controlled for a long time by her love of fresh air and exercise, but now it galloped through her and she could no longer go outside, merely watch the world from her bedroom window, from a carriage that took her to Switzerland even knowing it was hopeless, from the sanatorium bed where she wrote her last entries. Betty had to keep closing the book and walking around the room, trying to absorb the terrible grief, borne so patiently. She read the last page, swiping the tears from her eyes, as the dawn came up outside. She looked out of the window at the hawthorn, tight white buds appearing against the pink sky and reached for her phone. She would call him and tell him the truth at last. It was late there, past midnight, but he was a night owl and this conversation just couldn’t wait. She called him and the line went straight to voicemail. He didn’t pick up. He must be with Alannah or Adrienne. She allowed herself to feel the grief fully and completely, hers and Eliza's. 

Later she stood at the kitchen window waiting for the kettle to sing so she could make coffee in the French press. As she stood, gazing sadly into the weak glow of a tentative dawn, headlights swept across the hawthorn and a car slowed to a crawl outside. She craned a little to see who was up and about before six a.m., wondering if she’d soon be recounting what she saw on the morning in question on one of those true crime documentaries. The car turned around in the narrow street and the passenger door opened. One long slim leg. A motorcycle boot. Her heart leapt. It was ridiculous. No-one could be recognised by the lower third of one leg but then he put a hand on the roof of the car and she would have known his hand anywhere. She was out of the kitchen and running towards him before he’d even finished paying off the cab, bundling into him and demanding with her body that he put his arms around her, all thoughts of restraint gone. He was chuckling now, hoisting her up, his hands under her butt, her legs around his waist as she repeated his name. “Jug, Juggie, Jug… how are you here?” The cab pulled away but she couldn’t let go. 

“Betts, just let me pick up my stuff a sec. Come on Betts. It’s cold out here,” the laughter in his voice cut off as her lips met his in the kiss that she had been dreaming of for weeks. She was relieved to find that he responded with as much enthusiasm and diligence as she could possibly have desired, his tongue sweeping over her bottom lip, biting softly as she sighed and wriggled even closer. "Well that's certainly an improvement on the last time I made a pilgrimage to you." 

Eventually he managed to manipulate them into the cottage and sniffed the air. “Tell me that’s coffee. How can it take as long to get here from the airport as it took to get across the fucking Atlantic?”

“It’s coffee. I just have to wrangle this thing. Two minutes. How are you here?”

“I got your letter. I’m not going to ignore that. Not after all these years. Got right on a plane.” He grinned, but her look of confusion seemed to freeze the happiness on his face. “Was that wrong? Should I not have come?”

She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek again and again. “No, you should definitely have come. I was trying to call you earlier but you didn’t pick up.”

“No charge left. Like I said, stupidly long trip. Should we talk?”

“Yes, letter? What letter?” She was bewildered.

“This one,”he said, pulling a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket and showing it to her. "I dig the retro vibe but the sealing wax was an odd choice.”

She stared at the page, her own writing,

> _“My dearest Jug,_
> 
> _I expect you’ll think that I’m pretty eccentric for writing you a letter instead of calling or texting but I think this is the most appropriate way to tell you the thing that I need you to know. I am so in love with you.”_

It was the letter she had burned in the fire. She collapsed back onto the couch, dumbstruck. Then quietly she said, “Eliza? Was this you?” as he looked at her like she had lost her mind.

“I have literally no idea what’s going on here and I feel like I’m hallucinating I’m so tired. You wrote this, right? It wasn’t a joke or something?”

“I wrote it. I 've been trying so hard to work out how to tell you that I love you. I love you Jug." She gave a short, exasperated laugh. "See it's actually really easy. But if there’s someone else…” she paused and then her expression altered. “No, actually no ‘but.’ Fuck that. I want you. I think we can be something. So if there’s someone else I want you to drop her and be with me. There’s no point trying to be chill about this. I’d much rather be happy than dignified.”

“I love you too. There’s no-one else. It was a one time thing. We met up and I whined about being in love with someone who didn't see me like that, she told me about her divorce. We pooled our loneliness for a while but we really had nothing to talk about but misery. That's much too sad a foundation for anything.”

“But at Forsythe’s grave? I thought…You were with someone. There was someone at your place.”

“JB. I was with JB. I wanted her to find out about the family with me so she’s been staying at my place. It’s her history too. There’s no-one Betts. I’ve loved you since we were children and I’ve been in love with you since that first year in Iowa. We already are something. Now I want us to be everything. Shit I wish I wasn’t so tired. I want to be eloquent and poetic.”

“Come on. Let’s rest. We can talk when we wake up. We’ll always be able to talk when we wake up now.”

They climbed the stairs hand in hand and curled up together in her bed, sharing soft, reassuring, sleepy kisses but then she sat up abruptly with a sharp gasp, “Toffee, where’s Toffee?”

“JB’s still at my place. Everything’s fine. Toffee’s fine,” pulling her back into his arms into warmth and softness and comfort and love. As she drifted off to sleep she imagined she heard a woman's soft laughter downstairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Betty yells on the lawn is From Above from the Nick Hornby collab. Oh Betty...


	6. I Am Not This Body That Imprisons Me

> _I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you–especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly._  
>  From _Jane Eyre_ by Charlotte Brontë 

When she woke, the afternoon light was soft outside the window. He stirred and pulled her closer to him, groaning softly as he surfaced from sleep. “Hey, what did you find out about Forsythe?” she asked, stretching and then curling back against him.

“What, you want to talk about Forsythe? Aren’t we going to...you know...seal the deal?” he teased, nuzzling at her neck. 

“Mmm, I certainly hope so," she murmured, kissing his shoulder, "but I want to know what you found out and once we start that I’m not going to be able to think about anything else. So, Forsythe?” 

“I have his journals. I haven’t read all of them. Concise, he was not. I brought a couple with me though for you to read. And I have a letter from your girl. Eliza. She was pretty gone on him. Like you are on me, I guess,” he said with a chuckle, pulling up the hem of her t-shirt.

She pulled it back down and swiped away his hand gently. “Yep, just like. Read to me.” 

“Now? Not…after?” 

“Now please.” 

“Okay, okay.” He reached into that same decrepit kitbag and pulled out the journals, carefully wrapped in a clean cloth. “Oh I know the bit to read you. There’s a fight. This is from when Eliza got engaged.” 

So he read to her from Forsythe’s journal, the pages foxed and rippled as if they had been soaked and dried many times. It seemed to her, as she rested against his warm chest that sometimes his voice had its ordinary familiar sound, the voice that had been reading to her in just this way for most of her life but at some moments there was an accent, a rolling of the r's, a shortening of the vowels in that soft Scottish brogue. It was as if by learning about his past he was absorbing it into himself just as she wished she could absorb Eliza with all her courage and her determination.

> I am just lately returned from the great manor. I struggle to set down my thoughts they are so various and disparate. Since I learned that she is to be wed I have been in turmoil. I am not so deluded as to imagine that she might ever be mine. Would I bring her to this hovel, have her wash herself under the pump out of doors, have her birth my bairns with only the old drunken midwife to help her, have her widowed without family or friends to care for her when the pit props fail in a few months? Of course that is unthinkable. And yet I think of it. I think of the day under the hawthorn when I felt the pulse in her neck, frantic under my fingers, when she said that she would come with me to the fells and be mine if I willed it. My God, how I willed it. But she is stronger and wiser than me. She knew quite well that it could not be even though I believe she wished it too. I believe she wanted me as I have wanted her these many years. Her fingers brushed over my skin, there was such fire in her eyes as she helped me wash under the pump, she showed her claws when she told Jessie to sit. She was a tigress. I think of it all the time. May God forgive me for how I think of it. 
> 
> Somehow I could not stay away from the manor tonight, the night of her engagement soirée even though I knew I made myself ridiculous. I am a rude mechanical at the fairy court, a humorous distraction. And yet I skulked there because I have no shame where she is concerned. I slunk around the building, hoping for a glimpse of her but instead it was him I met. He was by the stables with his yellow haired painter friend, surveying his possessions no doubt, her soon to be part of that collection. He smiled at me as he insulted me. He knew my given name. I suppose she must have told him the night of his proposal when I happened upon them in the schoolroom, him on one knee, her laughing as if at a foolish joke. She saw me in the doorway that night and her face turned deathly pale as she cried out “Jock!” I was away, back to the cottages where I belong, with my own kind. She followed me and left him there on his knees, without even the ring on her finger and she let me kiss her out there on the hillside. I cannot believe that he has ever kissed her like that. For all his wealth and position he cannot love her as I do. 
> 
> “Forsythe,” he said, in his hail-fellow-well-met manner. “Will you join us for wine? Eliza would be happy to see you.” He mocked me, of course. As if I could have entered such a room in my working man’s apparel. The ladies would have been horrified. To imagine I would have embarrassed her by forcing her to acknowledge me in front of her fine friends. He must have seen my incredulity and he offered another suggestion, “Or come to the kitchens and I will send her down to speak with you. You may eat all you will, I have good porter laid in for the grooms.” 
> 
> “I will away home,” I mumbled, as he smiled at me, gracious in his victory. 
> 
> “You are her dearest friend Forsythe. I will not take her from you. When we are married you may see her whenever you wish. If she wishes it, there is employment for you here. If you choose you may live here at the manor.” I was bewildered by his suggestion. Then he gave the insult that showed me that he was mocking me. “The Viscountess and I will have separate suites. She may have call for you. Or there is a cottage by the lakeside. I ask only that you are discreet.” 
> 
> The suggestion that she would play the harlot, the idea that I would cuckold him, the notion that we would behave so abominably, that she, the most noble woman would lower herself to break a vow made before God was beyond words. I did not know I would strike him until he was already on the ground, the painter on his knees next to him. Perhaps he will send a magistrate for me. Perhaps he should, for if he maligns her again, I will kill him without compunction. 

He stopped and closed the book. “There was something weird about all that, don’t you think? The engagement. Was he misreading or was he being offered the bride?”

‘He was gay. Peregrine I mean. In love with the painter friend. She was trying to help him. She couldn’t have Forsythe and she needed to marry unless she was to become a burden on her brother. I think she might have suspected, in the back of her mind, that she was sick. But then the painter got cholera and died. I think Peregrine couldn’t live without him and drowned himself or maybe he just didn’t care enough to be careful in the lake. Three days before the wedding.” 

“Oh shit. Was the painter Arthur someone?” 

“Yes, why?” 

“There were some papers amongst Forsythe’s things. He paid for a memorial stone for some British artist. I saw the designs he was sent. He had it made in 1870 as soon as he started to make some serious money.” 

“He must have found out what had been going on. He probably learned that Peregrine was his benefactor. So he did the only kind thing he could for them. It’s a beautiful memorial. He was a good man Jug.” 

“He seems to have been. Now, enough reading. I’m about to faint from hunger. Feed me woman if you won’t satisfy me any other way.” 

“Okay, I’ll fix you something to eat and then we’ll go out on the fells,” she said brightly. 

“Really? Hiking? Can’t we just stay here and fool around?” he grumbled. 

“No. Eat, then hike and talk, then anything your heart desires. Promise.” She wanted them to reconnect before they made love, to build on their friendship instead of replacing it with sex. There were omelettes with cheese and mushrooms, his with hot sauce and jalapeños that made her worried for his gastric health. She drank hot tea with milk in the English style, made with leaves and boiling water as Prudence had shown her, him watching the ritual suspiciously over the rim of his coffee mug. 

A half hour later they were out on the fells and he was looking about in stunned silence. It had been dark, she realised, when the cab had brought him to her door, he hadn’t seen how beautiful it was. “Okay, I get the whole Lakeland poets thing now. This is incredible. Just sublime.” As they walked she took his hand and she told him about that night with Simon, about the panic attack, about the realisation that she had overlooked the one person that she needed to see most clearly. She sobbed out her apologies about that New Year fiasco and he swiped his hand over his own eyes as he told her it was okay now. “But fuck Betts, it was hard. All the way from Iowa I’d been working out this long ass speech about how I was ready and, if you wanted to try, I’d transfer to Columbia or somewhere and then, as soon as I got off the bus, we were off to some terrible party and you parked me like I was this big hassle and then you just handed me your key and were gone and that was it. I’d missed you. And the worst thing was that I knew you just hadn’t seen me at all. It wasn’t only that you didn’t want me, you just didn’t seem to know I existed, at least not as anything other than your weird friend from high school. And fucking Simon. Smuggest man in the continental US. I mean, maybe in the world, but I don’t have the data set. Fucking Simon. I fucking hate that guy. Anyway, it’s going to be okay. Shit, is this snow? Oh my God, where did it go?” 

She laughed, relieved that he could see it too. “Yeah, look there’s some timey wimey slippage just at the moment. We’ll get to that. Suspend your disbelief for a bit.” They walked a path that Betty knew well, even though it no longer existed, that took them up behind the village where they could see the beck with the long abandoned mill on its banks. She pulled a rug from her backpack and, having sat, patted the place next to her. There was a hawthorn coming into blossom at their backs, the sky cloudless and optimistic above them. He sat, putting his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close and sighing. “I didn’t think I’d ever have this Betty. I’m so happy that you wrote.” 

She smiled and relaxed into him, listening to the sounds of the hillside. She became aware that he was humming softly and smiled. “How do you know that tune?’ she asked. 

“I have no idea. It’s been in my head for a couple of days. On the way back from Albany it was driving me crazy,” he replied, beginning to whistle the tune. She joined in, supplying the words. 

“Fair and lovely as thou art  
You hae stown my very heart  
I can die, but canna part  
My bonnie dearie  
Ca' the yowes tae the knowes  
Ca' them whare the heather grows  
Ca' them whare the burnie rowes  
My bonnie dearie.” 

He lay back on the rug, a smile on his handsome face as he listened to the song, reaching for her as she finished and pulling her to him to kiss her. “I’ve no idea what it means but it seems like I should. It sounds like a home I don’t think I ever had ’til now.” 

She rested her head against his chest and then softly dragged her fingertips down his chest, pulling his t-shirt up to slip her hand against his warm belly. He sighed contentedly and then gasped in surprise when her wandering fingers slipped into the waistband of his jeans. She popped the button with a mischievous smile and he grabbed her wrist. “Betts, what the hell? We’re outside.” 

“And what day is it?” 

“It’s the first. May first.” 

“It is. Mayday, Beltane, outdoor sex on May Day is practically compulsory. Are you turning me down?” she asked, innocently, as she pulled off her shirt. 

“Shit, ok, well I didn’t say that.” She laughed and began to undress him. 

He was a little anxious that they would be arrested but she had chosen the spot with care for privacy. That slight edge of nerves about possible discovery distracted them both from the fact that they were taking such an irrevocable step in their relationship. She had been thinking of how she wanted to touch him for weeks. To run her hands over his chest, to kiss his hipbones and run her tongue down the groove alongside his belly had been the stuff of her fantasies but now to have him before her, caressing her, kissing her neck, his hand on her breast, his knee nudging her legs apart was almost too much. She pushed away from him and lay naked on the rug panting. “Not good? You want to stop?” he asked, an edge of panic in his voice. 

“No, God no. I want it all. It’s just …intense. I’ve been dreaming about you and now it’s happening I’m sort of panicking.” 

“Be still for a minute. You trust me. There’s no hurry. I’ve got you.” And he did have her. She knew he was empathetic and intuitive, that was obvious from his writing but now she saw that it made him able to feel what she felt, able to coax her body from panic to relaxation, to joy with his patient touches. It was a revelation to be so close to someone who knew everything about her and still accepted her entirely, didn't hold her shortcomings and failures against her. She knew that was the case because she knew him entirely and loved him without reservation, his imperfections only making him dearer to her. He whispered soft endearments, vows and oaths, as he kissed her and stroked her hair. Then he brought his hand between her legs, his head propped on his hand as he lay close beside her watching how she responded, leaning in to kiss her softly and murmur reassurance. As he touched her she gasped and it felt to her that the world breathed with her, the hawthorn above her, in bloom, the blossom drifting on the breeze and then, with a breath, bare twigs, stark against a white sky. In a juddering exhalation, green leaves, a sigh, full bloom again, over and over, a natural rhythm, all exactly as it should be, everything in harmony. His mouth was on her breast now, his teeth dragging against her nipple. She wanted to give him everything she was and everything she could be so she reached for him, insistent as she pulled him over her, touching him, guiding him as he moaned and shivered in pleasure at her touch. He pushed himself against her and she lay entirely open to him, the hillside alive with flower and the buzzing of insects. The heat of a late summer sun on her skin on this Spring day, a skylark, the reckless joy of its song in flight, ascending higher and higher and she was in all of it, the may, the lark, the blossom, the hillside, the beck, fulfilled and consummated, weeping and laughing. His beautiful face, his eyes so bright and loving, his lips parted as he spoke her name like an invocation. They were each other’s, now and always. 

Afterwards she lay curled against him as the sky deepened from cornflower to indigo. “Tell me about the timey wimey thing,” he murmured, “because that was unbelievably great but also really weird. The tree…” 

So she told him about the slippage, the flatness, Eliza and Jock in the vicarage, at the schoolroom, by the pump. She told him about seeing Peregrine with his lover and about how she had burned the letter that he had received a few days later, complete with sealing wax. “She wouldn’t let us throw away our chance, not when she and Jock had none,” Betty whispered. “She’s pretty determined when she wants something.” 

They headed back to the cottage and spent the evening surrounded by Eliza and Jock’s papers, piecing together the end of their story from the documents. Forsythe’s journal gave an account of his first return to Caldbeck after his success at the Lyceum almost a year after Peregrine’s death.

> “The locomotive travelled at enormous speed, devouring the miles that separated me from all my heart’s desire. I had my testimonial from the university registrar which would dispel any doubts that a man in whose voice the Glaswegian brogue could still be discerned could actually have received the honour of a Bachelors Degree from a great institution of higher learning. It proved that I was no longer the illiterate and ragged son of a dissolute, broken miner from East Kilbride. I was a man of letters, a professional gentleman. I would go to the rectory, present myself and my credentials and request the honour of calling upon Miss Eliza to pay my suit. They might turn me away, call a groom to knock me down, slam the door in my face. That would be their right. I would call again. I would call every day until I departed this vale of tears but I vowed to never give her up until she told me in person so to do. 
> 
> When I disembarked from the railway carriage at Wigton I faced a dispiriting three hour walk but happily I saw that there was a wagon waiting at the station to offload bolts of cloth and it seemed only sensible to enquire as to their return destination. On ascertaining that it had indeed begun its journey at the woollen mill in Caldbeck I asked for leave to return with the carter. The man looked at me curiously as he said, “Yes sir, you may of course, but I’m afraid the seats are none too comfortable. I shall enquire of the station master if we may have cushions and rugs.” 
> 
> I laughed heartily at that and assured him that I was used to discomfort and if he could endure it so could I. We discoursed most happily as we travelled the seven miles in less than an hour and a half and I gave the man a shilling. He was quite effusive in his thanks and I remembered when a shilling to me had been as a king’s ransom. To know that in my portfolio I had the one hundred guineas I had received in payment for my play at the Lyceum made me feel both proud and humble. It was enough to keep me at ease for a year, it would keep this man and his family forever. Still, I very much hoped that my household would soon increase considerably so I bade my Helios adieu and made my way to my goal. 
> 
> They did not turn me away. I was met in sad and somber terms. Mrs Furnivall ushered me into the parlour, the very sanctum which I had been beaten for despoiling as a child, and told me that Miss Eliza was not at home. I had missed her by a month. Her mother did me the courtesy to address me as Mr Pendleton when she informed me that her daughter had finally been prevailed upon to travel to Switzerland to take the rest cure when her coughing had rendered her unable any longer to discharge her duties at the school or even to leave her bed. I could barely believe her words. “She told me in her letters that she was in full health, that I should on no account trouble myself as to her condition, that her rambles on the fells had quite cured her.” 
> 
> “She did not wish that you should hear of it Mr Pendleton. She said that you have a great journey to make, plays to write, a world to discover, and she said that, since she was unequal to taking the road with you, she should ensure that she did not trip you before you set out. She has been unable to walk the fells for six months at least. Her brother travelled with her to the Continent. In his last letter he told us we should prepare ourselves. The cure is not working and she is not expected to see Michaelmas.” 
> 
> So I am too late. My hopes are dashed. The money is of no value. My degree can profit me nothing. My trials and tests were all in vain. I write this in a dark and dismal chamber above the tap room of the inn and I know not whether I should go to High Pike and tumble myself from the rocks or ask the innkeeper to procure me laudanum and dream my life to its close. “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!” 

“So she pretended she was fine as long as she could. If he’d known he would have raced back from London, wouldn’t have been there for his play, maybe wouldn’t have had the play produced. She was pretty determined that he’d be a success wasn’t she?” he said.

“She loved him. She’d have done anything for him,” she replied.

“Yeah but the one thing he wanted was to be allowed to love her. If he’d had that he could have done without anything else. You Furnivall women need to let us love you. Okay?” He took her hand and looked into her eyes and she nodded, promising, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Eventually they stopped kissing for long enough to tun back to the papers. She had a letter from Eliza’s archive from her father to her brother Charles. “So he decided not to throw himself off High Pike. He went to Switzerland instead.”

> My dear Charles  
>  This letter is to introduce Mr F. Pendleton Esq. of Lanarkshire and Caldbeck. He is an old acquaintance of Eliza’s and it is, apparently, his dearest wish to see her once more before she goes to her reward. I would be grateful, if you judge it not injurious, that you might indulge Mr Forsythe in this desire. He is a celebrated playwright and may be considered a proper person, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.  
>  Your affectionate father. 

He held up the journal. “This bit’s tough. This is the last time he sees her. You want to hear this?”

She nodded. “Yes. It’s okay because it wasn’t the end. She’s been here with me. There’s something after. I know that now.” He nodded and read, pulling her against him so he could hold her tight through the difficult part.

> I have seen her. She is much changed. I still see the girl in her, my playmate, my teacher, but it is as though she waits behind a gauze. Her complexion is pale, her eyes huge and luminous when she is able to open them, two high spots of frantic colour on her cheeks. Actresses employ paint and rouge and brighten their eyes with belladonna to achieve the effect that consumption has delivered to my beautiful and ruddy cheeked companion and I would give anything to wipe away that paint. She is weak, barely awake. I was permitted only twenty minutes but I am told I may return tomorrow if she lives. I do not think she knew who was there. I wanted very much to take her in my arms but her brother would have been forced to eject me had I essayed it and so I sat in a wooden chair at her bedside, murmuring pleasantries as she half slumbered when I wished to crush her against myself, kiss her and impart to her my own strength and vigour. Alas that animal energy will keep me alive for a good many years, years which it had been my dearest wish to devote to her and which will instead keep us apart, on opposite sides of the veil. 

“There’s another entry,” he murmured as she sobbed, his eyes wet too.

> I have returned from my second and last visit. She seemed to have rallied a little but the doctor assured me that the sickness had infected her blood and she would not recover. Today when I first leaned over her so that she might see who had come I whispered, “It is I Eliza, it’s Jock,” and she turned those glittering eyes on me and smiled. 
> 
> “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I tried to wait for you but I am so weak now. I am glad to see you before I go.” 
> 
> “You must not go,” I said resolutely. “There is much to be done. The school awaits your return. I require your services as reader and critic.” 
> 
> She shook her head. “Let us not lie to each other Jock. Not now.” She turned to her brother. “Charles, please leave us for a few minutes. I have some private messages to impart to Mr Pendleton.” 
> 
> Her brother demurred, “That would be improper Lizzie,” he said, clearly a little afraid of her even in her weakened state. 
> 
> “Oh Charles. What do you think will happen? Look at me. You may leave the door ajar if you fear an elopement,” she said and, God forgive me, I laughed. 
> 
> Charles slunk away like a chastised spaniel and I sat on the counterpane that I might feel the warmth of her body near me. “You have been cruel Eliza. I did not imagine that you would ever be so wanting of sympathy as to prevent me from being by your side until it is too late.” 
> 
> Her voice was low and urgent, she seemed to be hastening, breathless as she spoke. “I have done what I judged best. You may disagree. I could not have been happy knowing that I prevented you from taking your great opportunity and so, yes, selfishly, I said nothing. I have written a letter. Charles has it. I am so very tired. My comfort is to imagine the future you will have, the things that you will see, the kisses, the children, the wonders of your life. It makes me happy. But oh Jock, I am glad to have the chance to see you before the light goes down.” 
> 
> I could hold my silence no longer. “I love you Eliza. I have loved you since I was a child. Yours are the only kisses I desire, yours the only children that I would have fathered. I do not know how to go on without you. I do not think that I want to.” 
> 
> I do not know how much she heard because her eyes fluttered closed as I spoke. They never opened on this world again. 

“But she had written to him. This letter from her was tucked into the journal. Along with this.” He produced a curl of blonde hair tied with a sky blue ribbon. She took it from him, holding it between her fingers while she read Eliza’s letter.

> My own love, my Jock,  
>  I do not know why I believe that you will come to me but believe it I do, most fervently and steadfastly. It is, I suppose, an article of faith. It pleases me that I am able to have faith in you even if my hope in my redemption by Christ has been less than perfect. I fear that I think too much and trust too little when it comes to matters of religion. In you, however, I have always been able to maintain the most complete assurance. 
> 
> I believe that you will come but I confess I fear that you may come too late. Every day now I am less able to sit up, less able to converse. I sleep a great deal, waking to cough and to be pestered by my solicitous brother to eat a little calves’ foot jelly to which I have never been partial or to drink porter which I like a little better. I ramble. 
> 
> The matter is this, my darling boy. I love you most ardently and though it is not a maiden's place to make such a forward expression of her feelings I am emboldened by my circumstances. The grave will hide my shame soon enough. 
> 
> I am proud of you. Proud of your achievements certainly, your degree and your play are sources of very great satisfaction. How I wish I could have been among the audience. More than that I am proud of the man that you have become. Do you remember our first meeting? You and your father and your tiny sister had travelled from Scotland with a drover, walking much of the way, riding occasionally in a cart. There were dark circles under your eyes and holes in your boots and I think perhaps I loved you then. You stood apart when my father visited your cottage. My mother had sent us with a basket with apples and some bread and cheese and you watched that basket with such fascinated longing that I thought you had never seen food before. I had a slice of sand cake in my apron pocket and I beckoned to you and, cautious as a fawn, you sidled nearer when I held it out to you. I have always known that I can persuade you to almost anything with a little sugar. I had to show your father how to heat the griddle. I wondered how you would survive. 
> 
> You were small and slight and dark and dirty and I loved you. When last I saw you as you set off for London you were tall and slim and dark and beautiful and I longed to kiss you. I longed to kiss you as wife kisses her husband not as a maiden kisses the friend of her childhood. Perhaps I shock you by the frankness of my desires. Do those passionate eyes cloud and the dark brows knit in consternation? Perhaps I hope that you will be too late because I hardly know how to bear it if you see me so thin and enfeebled. I am ashamed of my weakness. I would be strong. I would be healthy and buxom and sturdy and I would bear you beautiful children. Now I am sure you are shocked. It will pass. As my flesh melts into the good Swiss earth, it will pass. 
> 
> It is my dearest wish to live long enough to hear you tell me that you love me too, not just love me as in days past but love me as a man loves a woman, as I expect you have loved women in London, actresses and women who call themselves actresses. I am jealous but only because nothing is left for me, no time for me to give you the only gift a woman has that is considered to be of value. You know I would have given it gladly had you asked but you were too good and too honourable to accept it when you could give nothing in return. Now it is too late. 
> 
> If I am able to be a better Christian in the brief span remaining to me, perhaps we may meet in that undiscovered country. I will run to you across the fells as when we were children, fall into your arms and love you in all the ways you should be loved, our marital bed the heather and moss. I love you. I would have been your wife. I wish you happy. I wish you would remember me with affection 
> 
> Your would have been wife  
>  Eliza 

As soon as she finished reading, Betty ran up to her room to return with a lock of dark hair. She twisted the strands together, gold and ebony, tying the light and dark blue ribbons around both curls, sighing with satisfaction to have them reunited at last.

Jug explained what he had found out about what happened afterwards. Forsythe must have gone from Eliza’s deathbed straight to Hamburg and taken ship for New York. He had found his record at Ellis Island, said it had made him sob because he’d given his name as Forsythe Furnivall Pendleton. JB had teased him. It just seemed so tragic to think of him all alone in the New World with a broken heart. A few years later he sent for his sister, Jemima. She married eventually and had a family, keeping house for him until he got too sick to stay in the city and moved out to the sanatorium. Maybe he’d caught TB from Eliza or she from him, maybe it had been complete coincidence, it had been endemic at the time. Jug and JB had spent a whole day with the second cousin in Albany, poring over the documents they’d inherited. He’d been able to borrow the journals on the understanding that everything would go back when he’d written about it. 

“Is it going to be a book then?” she asked, excited. 

“Maybe. We’ll see what you write first. I’m not going to steal your thunder.” 

The next few days were filled with laughter and soft touches, with promises and plans, with gentle caresses that quickly became urgent and fervent. She loved to wake him by taking him into her mouth so that those thick lashes flickered and his blue eyes opened already filled with desire and need. He wanted to kiss every part of her, revisiting every inch of her skin with his mouth, whispering “Oh I love your shoulders, your breasts, oh your hips, your ears…” until she was giggling, “Enough, I can’t wait any longer while you inventory me. Do your duty.” Every orgasm was like the freight train and she was desolate at how much time she had wasted riding the slow commuter service when there had been a locomotive at full steam, waiting to take her anywhere she wanted to go. Late on Friday afternoon, after a hike in soft spring rain, during an extended and rather sloshing bath together, she asked if he would come with her to the vicarage. 

“I feel a little debauched for vicars Betts,” he smiled, reaching a long arm out of the tub for his bottle of IPA and running his other hand over her breast. 

“No, he’s not stuffy. He’s going to be promoted or whatever to bishop. They’ve been kind. I think I have to go.” 

“Ok but you’ll have to put on a coal sack or something or all the clergy will be having unholy thoughts about you. You’re much too sexy to be seen by vicars,” he laughed. 

When she introduced Jug to Geoffrey and Prudence they both looked stunned. She’d forgotten about the watercolour. “You look like Jock,” she explained. “They have a painting. It’s just hard to get your head around at first.” 

“He was a great uncle, a few greats actually,” Jug told them. “Genetics are weird. I guess I’m a throwback.” 

Geoffrey agreed. “Yes, well that’s actually what we wanted to show you. Come into the dining room.” 

They followed him in and there, against the wall was a large portrait in oils. “It was in the attic, wrapped in a cloth. There’s a signature. I think it might be by Arthur Hatcham.” Betty gasped and reached for a chair to steady herself but Jug’s arms were around her at once, helping her to sit down. The face that looked back at her was her own, a little paler, a little thinner but it was the face that looked at her from the mirror every morning. It was Eliza, in a blue gown, her hair in the crown of golden braids that she had worn in the schoolroom. A window was open behind her and the fells could be seen in the distance. On a low table beside her stood the school bell and in her hand she held a book. When she peered closer she could see that it was a volume of the poems of Robbie Burns. 

“I have contacted the diocese. They say that the painting should go to the family so I think it must be yours. I don’t know if you want the dress too?" He looked meaningfully between her and Jughead. "It’s a little yellowed and there has been some moth damage, I'm afraid. More Miss Haversham that one would ideally like for a wedding.” 

“You should have it Betts.” Jug said quietly. “Maybe some of the fabric can be saved. Something old and all that.” He grinned at her and she nodded to show she understood. It wasn’t exactly a proposal but she knew that soon it would be and that made her happy. 

The day before they flew home they lay on the hillside by the hawthorn again, moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, less clothed than was exactly decent but too happy to care. Drifting up to them on the soft afternoon breeze they heard a melody, a man's warm baritone, "Fair and lovely as thou art, you hae stown my very heart, I can die, but canna part, my bonnie dearie." Sitting up they saw the smoke billowing from the factory chimney as it hadn’t for more than a hundred years and far below them, on the path to the village, a woman and a man, hand in hand, her very slim in a blue dress, carrying her bonnet by its strings, him tall and dark, stopping as his song finished and turning to take her into his arms. 

“I knew they wouldn't be slumbering quietly in the earth," he said, smiling. "Looks like they’ve found a way to make it work.” 

“Like us,” she said, as she kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song is Ca' the Yowes. It's not exactly by Robbie Burns but he brought it to notice. It's very beautiful and you can listen to it [here](https://youtu.be/sbEm_LYQOSE)


End file.
